Cuba is not only one of the most persistent migratory phenomena in contemporary Latin American history; it is also an exceptional case of national fragmentation. For more than six decades, millions of Cubans have left a relatively small territory in successive waves that, although different in their social composition, routes, and historical circumstances, share a fundamental question: What has happened within Cuba to make leaving, generation after generation, a recurring path to personal fulfillment?
Reducing the Cuban exodus to a search for economic prosperity would be insufficient. Human beings have always migrated to societies where they hope to find better wages and opportunities. The Cuban case has another dimension. Since 1959, emigration has also been linked to the concentration of political power, the suppression of pluralism, restrictions on civil liberties, the persecution of dissent, and, subsequently, economic and social deterioration that has taken on structural characteristics. The exodus cannot, therefore, be understood solely as a demographic shift. It is also the outward manifestation of a prolonged political, institutional, cultural, and psychological crisis.
The Cuban Revolution came to power in January 1959, presenting itself as a process of national restoration in the face of Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship. However, the new regime quickly evolved into a model of political centralization that progressively eliminated partisan competition and subordinated the country’s fundamental institutions to the revolutionary project. Fidel Castro ended up holding power for nearly half a century, while a one-party state took root in which political dissent could lead to consequences that went beyond ideological debate and directly affected citizens’ professional, academic, family, and personal lives.
The political repression that followed 1959 has been widely documented. There were executions, long prison sentences, persecution of opponents, surveillance, confiscations, professional expulsions, restrictions on freedom of expression, and successive campaigns against individuals considered ideologically incompatible with the revolutionary project. Human Rights Watch has described Fidel Castro’s political legacy as the creation of a repressive apparatus designed to punish virtually any form of dissent. The continued existence of political prisoners and restrictions on freedom of expression, association, and assembly after he left power further demonstrate that the Cuban problem never depended exclusively on the personality of a single leader. Castro built and consolidated institutions capable of perpetuating a specific conception of power.
But physical imprisonment is only the most visible manifestation of authoritarianism. There is another form of confinement that is much more difficult to quantify: the one that eventually takes root in the individual’s psyche. Generations of Cubans learned that not every thought should be expressed, that a conversation could change depending on who was present, and that certain spaces demanded a different public display of one’s private convictions. When this behavior persists for decades, censorship no longer requires a permanent censor. The individual internalizes the limits and begins to enforce them on their own.
Václav Havel examined a similar mechanism in The Power of the Powerless When analyzing the communist societies of Eastern Europe: citizens were forced to participate in ideological rituals whose outward acceptance did not necessarily correspond to their innermost convictions. The significance of this observation extends beyond politics. A society in which telling the truth can be inconvenient ends up developing complex mechanisms of pretense. Double-speak thus ceases to be exclusively a political strategy and can permeate labor, institutional, and even personal relationships.
This phenomenon helps us understand one of the least-studied ills of the Cuban system: the transformation of certain social behaviors under conditions of permanent scarcity, control, and precariousness. It would be intellectually simplistic to claim that Cubans have “lost their values,” as if this were a spontaneous moral mutation. The truly troubling question is another: What happens to everyday ethics when survival systematically forces people to violate the norms established by the state itself?
For decades, expressions describing informal survival strategies became part of everyday Cuban language: “resolver” (to get by), obtaining something “por la izquierda” (through unofficial channels), relying on a contact, clandestinely exchanging a product, appropriating certain state resources, or feigning support for what one privately rejected. These practices do not indicate a moral inferiority on the part of the population. They demonstrate the human capacity to adapt to a dysfunctional environment. The problem arises when these exceptional circumstances persist for generations and emergency behavior eventually becomes normalized.
A society based on permanent scarcity can lead to mistrust, opportunism, a weakening of the sense of collective ownership, and a gradual erosion of the norms of coexistence. Courtesy, respect for public spaces, certain codes of conduct, and interpersonal trust do not exist independently of material and institutional conditions. They require stability, predictability, and a minimum level of confidence that adhering to the rules will not put the individual at a disadvantage compared to those who violate them.
The loss of values that many Cubans perceive in contemporary society must be analyzed precisely from this perspective. It is not a matter of morally condemning a population that has been subjected to extraordinary circumstances for decades, but rather of holding accountable a system that turned the exceptional into the norm. When securing food, medicine, transportation, or housing consumes a disproportionate amount of one’s daily energy, the individual’s psychological horizon narrows. The future shrinks, and immediate survival takes priority over planning, civic participation, and, in certain circumstances, even solidarity.
Added to this deterioration is a growing concern about insecurity and crime. Thefts, robberies, interpersonal violence, and homicides are recurring themes in testimonies and reports from the island. The lack of sufficiently detailed and verifiable public statistics makes it difficult to draw rigorous comparisons regarding trends in specific crimes, a circumstance that necessitates avoiding speculative figures. This lack of transparency constitutes an institutional problem in and of itself: a society cannot design effective public policies to address issues it does not measure or whose data it does not allow to be independently examined.
The growing perception of insecurity takes on particular gravity when it coincides with poverty, scarcity, urban decay, and institutional mistrust. Citizens may end up experiencing economic insecurity, legal insecurity, and physical insecurity simultaneously. In such circumstances, social trust—one of the forms of invisible capital upon which a functional community is built—begins to erode. Fear then ceases to be related solely to political power and begins to spread to the immediate environment.
The demographic crisis is perhaps the most compelling evidence of the depth of Cuba’s problems. The country is not only losing population: it is losing a significant proportion of its young and working-age generations, while the relative share of the aging population is increasing. Official Cuban statistics have acknowledged an extraordinary population decline in recent years, accompanied by a historically low birth rate and mass emigration. More than a quarter of the population is now sixty years old or older, while hundreds of thousands of young people have left the island during the most recent migration crisis.
The human dimension of these figures is considerable. Parents whose children live on another continent; grandparents who watch their grandchildren grow up through a screen; married couples separated during the migration process; families scattered across Havana, Miami, Madrid, Houston, Tampa, Toronto, Montreal, and Mexico City. Cuba has gradually become a nation whose human geography extends far beyond its borders.
Aging also has economic consequences that are difficult to reverse. A society needs an economically active population to sustain its productive, health care, and social protection systems. When significant numbers of young people emigrate while the birth rate declines, the ratio between those who produce and those who need care becomes progressively unfavorable. The question is no longer simply how many Cubans remain in Cuba. The issue is who remains and what the country’s demographic structure will look like in twenty years.
Added to this is a tremendous loss of intellectual capital. For decades, Cuba has trained doctors, teachers, scientists, engineers, artists, researchers, and other professionals who have subsequently developed a substantial portion of their skills outside the country. When a professional emigrates, the country loses more than just a resident. It also loses the years invested in their education, their accumulated experience, and what that person could have passed on to the next generation.
A destroyed highway can be rebuilt. A building can be rebuilt. An electrical grid can be modernized. The rebuilding of human capital, however, takes generations. When a university professor leaves, a part of the education he or she would have provided to hundreds of students is also lost. When a researcher emigrates, it is not only their current knowledge that is lost, but also the projects they might have led. When a young doctor leaves, Cuba potentially loses decades of professional experience. The brain drain thus produces a multiplier effect.
There is also a less quantifiable form of cultural decapitalization. Customs are not preserved solely through books, archives, or songs. A culture is perpetuated because one generation passes on knowledge, codes, and behaviors to the next. Grandparents pass on memories; teachers, knowledge; artisans, their craft; families, certain ways of living together; writers, language; and neighborhoods, community norms. When millions of individuals are geographically dispersed and families remain separated for decades, the chain of cultural transmission inevitably changes.
The Cuban exodus is, therefore, also a cultural exodus.
Miami is the most extraordinary example of this human migration. The city was not merely a destination for Cuban exiles; it was profoundly transformed by them. Successive waves of exiles and immigrants built businesses, banks, restaurants, newspapers, radio stations, political organizations, cultural institutions, churches, art galleries, and professional associations. The Freedom Tower remains one of the great symbols of that initial reconstruction: thousands of newly arrived Cubans flocked there during the 1960s to receive assistance as they tried to start a completely new life.
Many belonged to a professionally and culturally educated class that lost its property, social standing, and recognition upon leaving the island. Doctors, businesspeople, writers, teachers, artists, and workers started over from a lower economic level than they had previously known. Some cleaned offices, worked in factories, drove vehicles, waited tables, or took whatever jobs were available. What is extraordinary is not romanticizing that suffering. It is observing what happened afterward.
They were able to rebuild themselves.
The experience of Cuban exiles in Miami thus presents a historically uncomfortable comparison. People from the same country and sharing the same culture demonstrated, under different institutional conditions, remarkable entrepreneurial, professional, academic, and cultural capabilities. This does not make the United States a perfect society, nor does it mean that all immigrants have prospered. Emigration entails discrimination, loss of status, precariousness, failure, loneliness, and enormous sacrifices. The essential difference lies in the existence of mechanisms that allow individuals to change their circumstances.
Outside of Cuba, many emigrants discover that economic improvement is only one aspect of freedom. They can change jobs, go back to school, start a business, build wealth, travel, access conflicting sources of information, publicly criticize the government, organize politically, and decide which personal projects they want to pursue. They can succeed, and they can also fail. This latter possibility is fundamental: freedom includes the individual’s right to make mistakes in the course of their own life.
Economic prosperity, then, has a meaning that goes beyond consumption. It fosters autonomy. An individual who is able to produce, save, acquire goods, and make career decisions possesses a degree of independence that profoundly alters his or her relationship with power. Property, employment, and the ability to make choices cease to be merely economic variables and take on a political and psychological dimension.
However, leaving Cuba does not mean immediately leaving behind the consequences of having lived in Cuba. The airport changes one’s surroundings much more quickly than it changes one’s mindset. The emigrant may carry with them mistrust, political hypervigilance, behaviors developed under conditions of scarcity, difficulty trusting certain institutions, guilt toward those who stayed behind, resentment, nostalgia, and a deeply fragmented identity.
Studies on the Cuban diaspora have extensively examined this relationship between memory, identity, and displacement. María Cristina García documented in Havana, USA the political and cultural development of the Cuban exile community in South Florida. Gustavo Pérez Firmat explored this in Life on the Hyphen the identity of Cuban Americans caught between two cultural worlds. Susan Eva Eckstein has analyzed the different generations of migrants and the complex transnational relationship between those who left and those who stayed.
There is a particularly painful paradox: a person can build a successful life in another country while psychologically remaining tied to a street they left behind thirty years earlier. Territories can be left behind in a matter of hours; a sense of belonging, memory, and trauma do not obey borders.
That is why Miami is not simply a demographic concentration of Cubans. It is also a living archive of the country that left Cuba. It preserves accents, foods, music, religious practices, political conflicts, family memories, and even rivalries that arose decades ago. In certain respects, the regime also emigrated along with its adversaries: its wounds, its divisions, its fears, and its language survived outside the island.
Cuba today has a cultural existence that is both internal and external. It would be impossible to write a contemporary history of the nation without taking Miami into account, just as it would be absurd to ignore Madrid, New Jersey, Tampa, and the numerous Cuban communities scattered throughout the world. The diaspora is no longer on the periphery of the nation. It is part of the nation.
Perhaps one of the most difficult aspects to explain to someone who has never lived through the Cuban experience is the normalization of the absurd. A college-educated professional whose salary is insufficient to cover basic needs; families financially supported by a child who had to leave the country; elderly people whose survival depends on remittances from capitalism—a system that official discourse condemned for decades; highly qualified individuals spending hours of their workday trying to obtain basic goods; buildings falling into disrepair over generations; young people who view emigration as a fundamental life goal. Each of these realities can be analyzed separately. Taken together, they describe a society in which the extraordinary has become the norm.
That process has profound psychological consequences. Human beings need more than just food and shelter. They need to look toward the future. They need to imagine that certain efforts they make now can change their situation later on. When that expectation disappears, existence becomes focused solely on the immediate present. Survival gradually replaces the pursuit of a better future.
Perhaps that is where one of the most profound harms caused by the Cuban regime lies—not only in what it banned, confiscated, imprisoned, or destroyed, but in the amount of human energy it forced people to expend simply to get by day to day.
It would be equally incorrect to explain all of Cuba’s economic problems while ignoring the U.S. embargo and sanctions. They have existed for decades and have had real economic consequences. An intellectually responsible analysis must acknowledge them. But acknowledging external factors does not eliminate internal responsibility. The embargo did not establish Cuba’s one-party system, did not ban electoral pluralism, did not imprison dissidents for expressing their opinions, did not design the national censorship system, did not create the internal mechanisms of political surveillance, nor does it alone explain why the Cuban state has systematically restricted fundamental rights. Confusing these two issues has served for decades to turn any internal criticism into a discussion about an external adversary.
Political responsibility does not disappear simply because of adverse international circumstances.
The Cuban regime must be judged on the basis of what it actually controlled: its institutions, its laws, its economic policies, its repressive mechanisms, and the treatment of its own citizens.
After more than six decades, the outcome cannot be assessed solely through economic statistics. Nor is it enough to count political prisoners, those executed, those in exile, or those who lost their lives trying to leave the country. There is a historical reckoning that is much more difficult to make: that of the lives that could have been.
The businesses that were never started. The research projects that never began. The books that could not be published. The teachers who ended up teaching in another country. The doctors who practiced far from their families. The children who grew up without their grandparents. The broken marriages. Citizens who learned to remain silent. Opinions that were never voiced. Years spent just trying to survive. Careers started over twice. Cubans who died longing to return, and those who finally did return only to discover that the country they had preserved in their memories for decades no longer existed.
The tragedy of Cuba is not merely that it has lost people. Cuba has lost millions of possible futures.
The greatest Cuban exodus, therefore, has not been exclusively territorial. It has also been intellectual, economic, cultural, familial, and psychological. Millions of people left the island in search of something more complex than a higher salary. They sought the basic possibility of imagining a life of their own.
A country is not its government. Nor is it a political party, a leader, an ideology, or even—exclusively—a territory. A nation is, fundamentally, the human community that constitutes it and the amount of future that community is capable of creating.
When, for more than six decades, successive generations have come to the conclusion that in order to build a life for themselves, they must leave the place where they were born, the historical question should no longer be directed exclusively at the emigrant: «Why did you leave?».
After so many years, so many broken families, so many scattered generations, and so many Cubans rebuilding their lives in other societies, the question must be directed at the power that remains:
What did they do to Cuba that caused so many Cubans to feel they had to leave just to survive?
