Interview with Cuban Leader Ernesto Limia Díaz

We are pleased to publish below an interview with Ernesto Limia Díaz (EL), a historian, writer, member of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (known as UNEAC, its Spanish-language acronym), and director of the TV program MARCAS. He is also the author of the bilingual book Patria y cultura en Revolución (Homeland and Culture in Revolution).

Duane Stilwell (DS), the editor of Panorama-Mundial, the Spanish-language sister publication of World-Outlook, conducted the interview in Havana, Cuba, on October 18, 2025.

The interview follows up on important questions facing Cuba and its people that Limia Díaz addressed in an essay, which first appeared on Facebook on July 18, 2025. World-Outlook published that essay,  ‘Everything for the People and with the People,’ on July 21 with the author’s permission.

The essay was part of a public discussion that swept Cuba last summer. The debate broke into the open in the aftermath of the resignation of Cuba’s minister of labor and social security, Marta Elena Feitó Cabrera, on July 15.

Feitó Cabrera resigned after making contentious remarks at Cuba’s National Assembly, the country’s parliament, a day earlier. Her televised comments went viral on social media, causing a major uproar by the public and government officials alike.

The former minister told the National Assembly that “there are no beggars in Cuba, that the island’s beggars are faking poverty in search of easy money, and that those cleaning windshields on the streets or picking up rubbish from trash bins are actually collecting raw materials without paying taxes.”

In his essay last summer, Limia Díaz drew out the challenges Cuban revolutionaries face today as they try to confront the impact of a severe economic crisis, which has led to major blackouts and shortages of food and medical supplies and has intensified social problems such as begging and homelessness.

Limia Díaz acknowledged that this economic crisis is caused, to a large degree, by an intensifying U.S. economic war aimed at asphyxiating and overthrowing the Cuban Revolution. However, he focused his essay on “the problems that, in my humble opinion, are within our means to solve as soon as possible.”

Among other important points, Limia Díaz noted that “we cannot ignore that formalizing a private economy presents challenges to the Cuban model. One thing we must be clear about: under socialism the blind laws of the market cannot govern ― or to be precise, the ‘blind’ laws of those seers who control the market. Under socialism the market cannot dictate the trajectory, it must establish a harmonious relationship with the interests of society. Achieving this requires planning, audacity, control, and solidarity education.”

The Cuban leader emphasized the importance for revolutionaries of honesty and the ability to listen as essential qualities for drawing Cuba’s working people into the discussion on how to collectively find solutions to the serious social problems the Revolution faces today.

“The proliferation of technocrats, incompetent bureaucrats and employees without any social commitment ― sometimes resentful due to their own privations and dissatisfactions ― adds fuel to the embers of Yankee harassment,” Limia Díaz noted.

He also acknowledged that discussion on the issues he tackled in July has been building in Cuba for some time.

“I recently met the moderator of a group that appeared in WhatsApp during the pandemic. They took the name ‘Learning from Covid’’’, Limia Díaz wrote. “Since then, they have produced 153 observations. They are veterans and they are revolutionaries with sharp opinions. They are pained by the poverty that sprouts again, the instances of corruption, the inoculated germs of capitalism. Who isn’t?”

In the interview that follows Limia Díaz expands on these issues.

He notes, for example, “We have people in Cuba today with a neoliberal mentality. We cannot ignore it, or we will not be able to put a stop to it. They do not call themselves antagonists of the Revolution, but deep down they are. They do not identify as such because they know that the Revolution still has the strength of the majority, but they are crouching there and trying in a thousand ways to put the strategies of the market above society.”

We believe the Cuban leader’s candid observations are of enormous importance and would interest anyone concerned with the challenges facing the Cuban Revolution today.

The interview was conducted in Spanish. Translation into English, as well as photos and notes, are by World-Outlook. Due to its length, we are publishing the interview in three parts, the first of which follows.

— World-Outlook editors

*

(This is the first of three parts. The others can be found in Part II and Part III.)

DS: On July 18 you published the essay “Everything for the people and with the people,” which we re-published in World-Outlook. This was three days after the resignation of Cuba’s minister of labor and social security following controversial comments she made in the National Assembly about homelessness and other social problems in Cuba. In your essay you referred to an article that was published in Trabajadores^[1] in April 2024, “The Faces of Silence Scream,” which gave a very honest description of homelessness in Cuba. You referred to it as “a wake-up call.”

Can you describe the significance of those events, and the reaction to them by the Cuban government and the country’s institutions, such as UNEAC? Are there other similar examples in the Cuban media? Can you expand on the importance of this type of coverage in the Cuban press?

EL: The note, which I published on my Facebook page, was associated with the incidents surrounding the remarks in Parliament of the then Minister of Labor and Social Security of Cuba María Elena Feitó Cabrera. The way she expressed herself was unfortunate, and it generated popular rejection. She said that the people who were digging in the garbage dumps of the streets of Havana were people who didn’t need to do so, and that there was no reason to help them. And it was not only what she said and in the context in which she said it ― at a time when inflation has put more than a few people in Cuba in a state of vulnerability ― but also the tone in which she said it, which sometimes weighs more than the content.

I reacted to the debate unleashed in the social networks and remembered the article published in Trabajadores a year earlier, about people who were sleeping in doorways in the streets of Havana ― and even on benches ― who here are called destitute, a term used to define people sleeping on the street, without shelter.

It is an issue that the country’s leadership has already been working on; but from the point of view of the press, it was Trabajadores that spoke about it, at least in the capital. In fact, the most serious problem that Cuba has in terms of political communication is that, with few exceptions, its news media ― nothing more and nothing less than in the middle of a Revolution, and surrounded by a neoliberal jungle ― continues to cling to schemes from the 1980s and 1990s, despite the fact that the newspapers are being managed by young people.

In my humble opinion, the rules of the game of cognitive warfare on the social networks on the Internet have not registered among those directing press policy. The prevailing argument is that addressing certain problems that have great impact on the people with the directness demanded by ordinary Cubans only “provides ammunition” to anti-Cuban campaigns ― increasingly perfidious and slanderous, increasingly plagued by falsehoods ― without considering the full extent of the effects that the influence of these campaigns has among not negligible segments of our population.

Today the majority of our people and our young people, especially our young people, do not watch television ― much less the news ― nor do they read the press; they are informed or misinformed on the Internet. It is a global trend we were unable to avoid; therefore, since we are not fighting this battle with the audacity that the social networks demand, and we also rely on ineffective media tactics ― except for a few journalists in the printed press, radio, and television who do exhibit leadership ― in general the media are lagging behind in the battle of political communication.

However, there are some newspapers, such as Trabajadores and Escambray, in the center of the country, which have a greater number of readers, and of course Cubadebate, the Cuban digital media with the greatest visibility both in the country and worldwide. It is a problem that has been vigorously discussed within the Union of Journalists; I know that many comrades there are fighting for this phenomenon to be understood, but there is still a lot of ground to cover to raise awareness.

Returning to the intervention of the then minister of labor in Parliament, given the humanist tenets of the Revolution, her words were strongly rejected by the people. The anti-Cuban press in the service of the Yankee agenda knows this and jumped on the bandwagon. Their scheme begins with cranking that motor and it is then fueled by the Western press. That engine has been well greased over years of media campaigns and runs with the precision of a Swiss watch. But given the rules of the game of cognitive warfare, we went from the era of propaganda to the era of awakening frenetic emotional responses.

Here we refuse to allow begging to be normalized, as is the case in most of the world; it would be betraying Fidel [Castro] and the essence of the Revolution. Therefore, with a statement of this type on such a sensitive issue for our people, she committed [political] suicide in the eyes of the Cuban people.

It is worth clarifying that in Cuba, as in the rest of the world, political communication is done from various channels and stations; that is, many people contribute from various sectors who do not work in the traditional press. As is my case: I am a historian, I have a television program that I write, host, and direct — MARCAS, and a modest Facebook presence. And in the midst of the heated reaction that ensued, in the middle of an exchange that led in a self-destructive direction, I decided to participate. I understood that it was important to present my arguments because of the adverse effect that the statement had and the perfidious way in which it began to be manipulated abroad.

That’s where the note came from.

DS: I would like to add a small point along these lines. When I read the Cuban press, many times the articles support the revolution, they are solid, well written — and of course, there is a place and a space for that — but many times they neither inform nor analyze.

EL: That’s true.

DS: And then, if they do not inform or analyze, people are adrift, there is no direction. And that’s what the press is for. I mean, if you look at the media in the Western, or more accurately imperialist, countries, the narrative is controlled by the wealthy ruling class through media monopolies. Not too long ago, there were many more companies worldwide, and now they are a handful. In other words, it has been monopolized, and they have almost total control.

EL: In my humble opinion, there are two things that carry great weight. One, as I suggested earlier, is the mentality of a fortress under siege. Like the comrades who consider certain media policy principles from the 1980s and ’90s to still be valid in the current circumstances; principles that were outlined back then by the generation that brought us here ― which had the merit of having made and preserved the Revolution in the worst circumstances ― when the rules of the algorithm did not prevail on the Internet.

As can be expected, because of the times in which they lived, no matter how much they may have wanted to, they could not picture the technological and paradigm shift that we were going to have to face today, at a time when the arguments of the adversary reach the Cuban family table in real time through WhatsApp, Facebook, and YouTube, while the majority of our young people, and the not-so-young, do not read Granma,^[2] do not read Juventud Rebelde,^[3] and do not watch the Round Table^[4] or the news.

The main theater of operations of the culture war unleashed by the United States government against the Cuban nation is the social networks on the Internet. And the right place to discuss this, with the idiosyncratic frankness that characterizes the Cuban people, is where the main battles are taking place. Our parents’ generation has a hard time understanding this. And I think they are now too old to understand. I believe those of us who must now do the persuading ― from my generation on down ― have not had the capacity to do so. We are to blame.

At the same time, in the middle of the difficult economic conditions that Cuba is experiencing, many of the most capable journalists, with the greatest capacity for analysis, have left the media because salaries are low and inflation does not stop galloping. Most have sought other sectors in which they can find solutions to the pressing problems of daily life. A few sold their souls to the adversary that for more than 60 years has tried to suffocate us with hunger.

Both in the press and on television, some heavy lifting is done by young people without the appropriate experience and culture, who lack enough knowledge of history and international events to provide a proactive analytical solution. There is all of that. But I can assure you of one truth that is rock-solid: our press does not lie. The revolution preserves that. Although, unfortunately, it has a long way to go to reach, with all its potential strength, those on the front lines of the fight, who today are found in the social networks.

(This was the first of three parts. The others can be found in Part II and Part III.)

NOTES

[1] Trabajadores is the official newspaper of the Confederation of Cuban Workers (known by its Spanish-language acronym as CTC). Trabajadores published the article “The Faces of Silence Scream” on April 8, 2024. The original in Spanish can be found here.

[2] Granma is the daily newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba.

[3] Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth) is the daily newspaper of the Union of Young Communists in Cuba.

[4] Round Table is a Cuban state-run television talk show that discusses current events, particularly political and social issues, and often presents official government positions. It is broadcast daily or almost daily.

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