Gustavo Marín Duarte, founder of the Abdala Group and Cuban exile since 1961, provides a bleak diagnosis in an interview with Tania Costa for CiberCuba, addressing what he defines as seven decades of accumulated failure and the exhaustion of the political and social reserves of several generations of Cubans, both on the island and in exile.
Marín arrived in the United States at just 13 years old, a few weeks after his father was arrested in the days leading up to the Bay of Pigs invasion.
"My father worked; he held a relatively important position at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was part of that generation that believed in Cuba. He was ready for change, a practical change, a change for everyone, a renewal of the spirit that had transcended through the ages," Marín recounted.
The weight of that failure does not rest solely on those who experienced the foundational moment of 1959. Marín highlights a fatigue that has been passed down from generation to generation, with none of them managing to overturn the dictatorship or build a viable alternative from within or from exile.
This diagnosis today has an unprecedented demographic correlate. Between 2021 and 2026, more than 1.79 million Cubans left the island in the largest exodus in the country's history. Birth rates have fallen to their lowest point in 65 years, the country lost more than 307,000 inhabitants in just 12 months, and 25.7% of the population is over 60 years old.
38% of Cuban households have at least one member living outside the island, a figure that illustrates how human depopulation has ceased to be a statistic and has become the everyday experience of almost any Cuban family.
The analyst Alejandro de la Fuente describes this phenomenon as a "stampede" of young people who grew up without Fidel Castro, with access to the internet and lacking identification with the revolutionary myth, which makes the crisis potentially more irreversible than previous ones.
That young generation, which under different circumstances could lead a change, has largely chosen to leave. The question that runs through the interview—whether a change in Cuba is possible and how to achieve it—hangs in the air above that void.
Marín founded the Abdala Group along with six other young Cuban students on January 28, 1968, at the Woodstock Hotel in New York. The organization, studied by historian Michael J. Bustamante in a 2015 academic article, combined anti-communism with an explicit rejection of U.S. imperialism, representing an unorthodox nationalist current within the historical exile.
The activist Carolina Barrero has recently warned that the depth of the current crisis alone does not guarantee a political solution, a perspective that aligns with the skepticism that Marín reflects on decades of missed opportunities and generations consumed by a dictatorship that has been in power for over seven decades.
Filed under: