From "History Will Absolve Me" to "History Will Judge Them"

On October 16, 1953, in a small room at the Civil Hospital of Santiago de Cuba, a young lawyer on trial for the assault on the Moncada barracks concluded his speech with a phrase that the dictatorship would later turn into a dogma: "Condemn me, no matter. History will absolve me."

Seventy-three years later, the President of the Government of Spain stepped up to the Congress podium this Friday to warn those about to vote against his housing decrees that "history will judge them sooner than they think and more forcefully than they can imagine." The decrees failed. And Pedro Sánchez, like that Fidel, invoked an imaginary tribunal to reject the verdict of the only real tribunal a leader has in a democracy: the Parliament.

The coincidence is not merely rhetorical. It is also part of the agenda.

What Fidel promised at Moncada

Few remember that in that same speech, Castro already had his solution for housing: a revolutionary government, he said, would solve the problem by halving rents. And he followed through. In March 1959, Law 135 reduced rents by between 30% and 50%. In October 1960, the Urban Reform Law arrived: renting was prohibited, property owners were stripped of their properties, and tenants began paying the State instead. For half a century, buying or selling a house between individuals was prohibited in Cuba; the regime did not allow it again until 2011.

On paper, it was the dream of any housing activist: rock-bottom rents, no evictions, the landlord eliminated from the equation. The people applauded. For a few years, it seemed to be working.

What remains: ruins

But when no one owns anything, no one takes care of it. When it cannot be rented, no one builds to rent. And when the state holds everything, it soon realizes that it also lacks the means to maintain it.

The result is evident to anyone who walks through Centro Habana. The regime itself acknowledges a deficit of over 800,000 housing units. According to official figures, around a thousand buildings in Havana collapse each year, many with families inside. Three and four generations are crammed under the same roof, in improvised shanties, because moving is impossible. And the grand solution of the dictatorship for 2026 has been to turn shipping containers into homes.

That is the legacy of Moncada in terms of housing. In Cuba, there are no evictions, it's true. There are also no houses.

Spain, 2026

No, Spain is not Cuba, nor is Pedro Sánchez Fidel Castro. Spain is a democracy with independent judges, a free press, and a Congress that today has said no to the Government. Precisely for this reason, it is wise to examine the path before walking it, because ideas have consequences and disasters are not foreseen: they are legislated, decree by decree.

For communists, the housing problem is not that there are not enough homes, but that there are homeowners.

What did the defeated decrees bring? The suspension of evictions until 2030. The prohibition of purchasing housing from so-called "vulture funds" until 2028, without even defining what a vulture fund is. The extraordinary extension of rental contracts. Limitations on rent increases. In other words, more burdens, more risk, and fewer rights for those who put a home on the market. To build, there’s hardly anything more than reorganizing public housing and reducing VAT.

And behind the decrees, the street. The Tenants' Union, which has been camping out at Puerta del Sol for days, has called for a general strike that “stops the country” today. Their demands: permanent contracts, a reduction in rents, the expropriation of “vulture funds,” and an end to all evictions. Read it slowly and place it alongside the laws of 1959 and 1960. It’s the same music. Only the orchestra has changed.

The communists in the Council of Ministers

It is not an exaggeration to speak of communists in the Government. Yolanda Díaz, the second vice president and Minister of Labor, has been a member of the Communist Party of Spain since 1986. Sira Rego, the Minister of Youth and Childhood, comes from Izquierda Unida. Just a week ago, both shared a poster with another minister from Sumar at the annual PCE celebration in Rivas, where Cuba was featured in the debate program. Not as a warning, of course.

For them, the housing problem is not the lack of homes, but the existence of property owners. The solution is never to build more, but to redistribute what others have built. It is the same logic that has brought Cuba to where it is now.

Sánchez and his tribunal of history

Sánchez probably doesn’t believe in any of this. Nor does he need to. He is satisfied as long as it serves his purposes. A president without budgets, without a majority, and with the legislature on its last legs has found the perfect narrative in housing: on one side, the people; on the other, the speculators, landlords, funds, and the parties that supposedly protect them. It's the same old populist playbook: instead of solving the problem, focus on finding a scapegoat. And if it suits him, call for elections with that scapegoat on the poster.

The problem is that property owners are not an abstraction. They are, for the most part, families with one or two apartments who are supplementing a pension or a salary. When they are treated like enemies, they do the only rational thing: they withdraw their homes from the market. And then there are fewer apartments, prices go up, and more people end up on the streets. Exactly the opposite of what was promised.

The verdict

Fidel asked history to absolve him. History has already rendered its verdict, and it is written in the rubble of Central Havana, in the balconies that collapse over the street, and in the families that wait, generation after generation, for a home that never arrives.

To those who today promise half-price rents, abolished evictions, and property under suspicion, history will not have to wait seventy years to pass judgment on them. They need only look at Cuba. That judgment has already taken place, and Cubans have been serving the sentence for more than six decades.