The Argentine intellectual Rubén Chababo published an essay this Tuesday on the CubaxCuba platform, addressing one of the central dilemmas of any political transition on the island: how to manage the memory of more than six decades of regime without resorting to either a total erasure of the past or its uncritical glorification.
Chababo, a professor of Literature at the National University of Rosario and director of the Memory Museum in that city from 2002 to 2014, argues that the historical cycle that began in 1959 is nearing its end, and that "the landscape of darkness, despair, and ruin in which its inhabitants survive is the most representative image of their present."
The essay begins with two quotes from writer Mario Vargas Llosa that serve as a synthesis of the intellectual journey of an entire Latin American generation: “No Latin American can escape the fact that the Cuban Revolution marks the transformation of America,” he wrote in the Havana newspaper Revolución in 1965; and then, in 2019, before Radio Martí: “The myth of Cuba has already been shattered.”
For Chababo, Cuba was not only a Cuban event, but also a Latin American and global phenomenon that, during the second half of the 20th century, drew the attention of intellectuals from across the ideological spectrum. This plurality of experiences is precisely what makes the issue of future memory so complex: “Therefore, there will not be a single Cuba when referring to it in the past tense. There will be many Cubas, constructed from different experiences and positions.”
To articulate his argument, the author draws on two theoretical frameworks. The first is the concept of "social frameworks of memory" from the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who demonstrated that we do not remember alone but rather through the groups to which we belong. The second is the notion of "just memory" from the philosopher Paul Ricoeur: "Just memory does not imply that all memories are equally true or that all experiences hold the same moral value. Recognizing the plurality of recollections does not require suspending historical judgment."
This memory must reconcile deeply contradictory realities: the fascination that the Revolution awakened in the young Vargas Llosa coexisting with the terror that even then haunted writers like Virgilio Piñera, harassed by the "moral patrols of State Security" because his life and work did not fit the model of parameterization.
Chababo warns that future Cuba must avoid two symmetrical temptations: "to turn the end of the regime into a massive operation of erasure, acting as if the decades since 1959 were merely a historical mistake," or to preserve the narrative of the Revolution as a closed entirety incapable of acknowledging its contradictions.
The author also establishes a distinction he considers crucial: the difference between an "anti" moment and a "post" moment. The former is defined by what it fights against and risks reproducing, albeit in an inverted manner, the binary logic of the previous regime. "A democratic Cuba will have to learn to live after the Revolution without needing to live constantly against the Revolution," he writes. "If the new order could only be defined by its opposition to the previous one, the past would continue to govern the present, albeit under an inverted sign."
The essay also calls for a self-critique from those outside the island who contributed to building the revolutionary myth, and points out that successive Cuban leaderships will have to account for state violence and political persecution.
The text is part of a debate that has gained particular intensity in 2026. The Center for Coexistence Studies presented its 2026 Proposals Catalog featuring 20 thematic areas developed by more than 991 experts, while possible routes towards a transition continue to be analyzed. This all takes place as Prisoners Defenders documents 1,327 political prisoners on the island at the end of July 2026, the highest number recorded by that organization.
"Will that perhaps be the greatest challenge for the future Cuba," concludes Chababo: "not to decide in advance what Cuba deserves to be remembered, but rather to create the conditions for the different Cubas that coexisted during these decades to enter the historical conversation: the Cuba of utopia and that of disillusionment; the Cuba of refuge and the Cuba of prison; the Cuba that nurtured hopes of emancipation and the Cuba that persecuted those who did not accept the imposed order.
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