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.

A summary of the main points of that essay can be found in the introduction to Part I.

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 second of which follows.

— World-Outlook editors

*

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

DS: What is the impact on Cuba of the U.S. economic war, the blockade? Can you describe the economic and social difficulties facing the Cuban people today?

EL: Is there a U.S. blockade against Cuba? Well, yes. What happens is that, more than a blockade, it is about economic and financial harassment. There is an all-out and unscrupulous war that resorts to state terrorism and financial sabotage. With the Trump administration and the access of the anti-Cuban mafia^[1] to the State Department, it has reached a point of extreme treachery.

When they thought that they had tried everything, in his first term Trump sent Mauricio Claver-Carone, former coordinator of the anti-Cuban lobby in Congress, to dig around in the Treasury Department and find all the ways that allowed Cuba to alleviate the effects of the siege, and he did his homework. That move resulted in 243 new sanctions with devastating effect.

And, as if that were not enough, they have done much more than that. When you say blockade, that means to prevent an action, an operation… right? But if, in the framework of the war to damage the Cuban electric system, you buy the company that supplies spare parts to the largest source of electrical energy generation in Cuba — the Antonio Guiteras thermo-electric plant in Matanzas — you are moving to another level.

That was done by the Biden administration, which left all of Trump’s measures in place and, in addition, provided what it believed to be the checkmate: as part of an operation between the government, the CIA, and finance capital, General Electric bought the French firm that built the Guiteras and was therefore committed to guaranteeing the supply of spare parts and maintenance. A Dantesque maneuver, devised by cynical people of the worst moral character.

And the most egregious thing was something [former U.S. president Ronald] Reagan had done to include Cuba on the list of countries that sponsor terrorism.^[2] But when Reagan did that, which was a concession to the Cuban mafia in Miami, it did not have the effect that it has today, because today being part of that spurious list of countries that sponsor terrorism — they know perfectly well that this is false — has a greater impact, because today the banks of the Western world are connected by the Swift system.

Financial terrorism

When a country is included in that list, that list is updated in the system and immediately no bank, nor any agency linked to that system, which is the entire West — can negotiate with the country in question. No transaction can be made, in a world in which there is no longer any circulation of liquid money, in which everything is virtual operations.

So how do you negotiate? If for Cuba tourism is our petroleum, and the main sources were Italy, Canada, and Spain, all linked to the system, how are the tour operators who brought us those tourists going to function if they can’t pay? It’s a brutal thing. That is why they have preserved it, keeping on the list of states that sponsor terrorism a country that was declared a zone of peace in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Biden, a perfidious and cynical guy, removed us from the list when he was already leaving. Why did he wait so long? He thought as he entered the Oval Office that the Cuban Revolution was destroyed and only needed a little push. He ordered the CIA to bring it about and left everything as it was [under Trump’s first term] to provoke a social explosion that would facilitate the work of Langley’s^[3] crusaders. He finished his term and — to look good with God and the Devil — he removed us from the list, which means that he clearly understood the falsehood and injustice of the accusation. He did this as he was handing the key to the office to the White House butler.

Trump, the Caribbean bully, arrived and reversed that decision without wasting a moment. What was the effect?

What does the most damage to Cuba is the economic harassment, the financial harassment, based on acts of espionage to interrupt the country’s investments and commercial operations around the world. Carrying out espionage to acquire properties that may affect us is not so much a blockade as an act of financial terrorism. There is a whole apparatus of commercial and economic intelligence to sink the island of freedom, the symbol of dignity, the symbol of social justice, with one purpose: to break our moral compass.

When I talk to my comrades, I say: Look, all over the world at the left — the forces of the true left — and decent people, when they want to orient themselves on an issue or conflict, when they are looking for political guidance, they do not look to Russia, China, or Venezuela, they look to Cuba: “What is Cuba saying?”, “What is Cuba thinking?” And they, the Yankees, know it.

Cuba is an underdeveloped country that at this moment is experiencing the toughest situation of its entire existence; but it remains a political power of universal reach. And they, there in Washington and Miami, know it.

Cuba remains the moral and cultural compass of the world

Russia is the military adversary, and China is the economic adversary. But Cuba is the political adversary, that is clear. We are more than that: in a world in which ethics has disappeared from politics, the moral adversary is Cuba, and Cuba, with all the errors, with all the limitations, with all the deficiencies and imperfections, continues to be the moral compass, the ethical compass and the cultural compass. Now, the difficulties that this generates are unimaginable for someone not connected to this reality.

So we have a country subjected to a ferocious blueprint of economic and financial harassment; a country that has almost been deprived of its sources of income and investment; a country that during Covid-19, because it is an island, was forced to use up its reserves because it had to close its borders and defeat the pandemic alone, and yet achieved results that could then be declared superior to any country in the first world.^[4]

What has Cuba done in the face of the current challenges in the economic sphere? First, it reorganized its enterprise system at the state level. But a country without foreign investment, without stable sources of supply, how can it develop its industry? So, side by side, it gave people the opportunity to connect with the microeconomy by formalizing the existence of small and medium-sized private enterprises, in coordination with the interests of the state and our population.

To say that the current leadership of the Revolution was the one who began to apply the private economy in Cuba is unfair. It was Fidel who started it at the beginning of the Special Period.^[5] Raúl [Castro] gave him continuity. During the presidency of the country by Miguel Díaz-Canel,^[6] what has been tried is to formally organize these sectors, with all the difficulties that a phenomenon like that brings in the harsh conditions we face today. At this stage, when the country’s public services are depressed, the private economy multiplies social inequalities.

We have a universal, free health care system, but it is depressed. Many people must buy medicine abroad, or in Cuba pay high prices to the people who bring it from abroad. And the sellers of the medicines recoup in the price what the ticket cost them, plus their profits. So, if a blister pack of paracetamol in Panama cost you $10, here they sell it for $30, because they must include the cost of the ticket, the stay in Panama, plus their profits. Therefore, here a blister of paracetamol costs you three times what it costs you in Panama or what it costs you in the Dominican Republic or Mexico.

Inequalities and ideological pressure

There are people who go to Mexico to look for supplies, and they sell them here two or three times more expensive. To them you need to add those who steal medicines from our warehouses, unscrupulous people who do not measure the scope of their acts, or do not care as long as they make a profit. All this generates inequalities and generates a very great ideological pressure among our popular bases.

So, we have a fortress besieged by suffocating harassment, which has as its counterpart a Miami where Cubans enjoy privileges that no other Latino community has, precisely because they want to paint it a paradise on earth so that people end up leaving or aspiring to that model of economic development. In his article “Itinerant Teachers” Martí^[7] wrote a phrase I usually remember: “Being good is the only way to be happy. To be cultured is the only way to be free. But, in the commonality of human nature, one needs to be prosperous to be good.”

In other words, in the commonality of human nature, it is necessary to have prosperity so that those primary instincts, the instincts of self-preservation, which align so well with the extreme individualism advocated by neoliberal ideology, and which in some way has permeated certain segments of the population, are not awakened.

Yes, in the middle of the harshest economic adversities, without Fidel or Raúl at the head of the government, we have a generation that today is 30, 30 plus, or 40 years old, who did not know the revolution before the fall of the socialist camp, but knew the revolution of the 1990s until now. Therefore, this generation has known the revolution of difficulties, the revolution of poverty, the revolution of certain economic and ideological setbacks. A complicated, difficult, very difficult scenario has taken shape.

DS: In recent years many Cubans have left the island (over 2 million in the last five years by some estimates) and have emigrated to other countries. Can you describe the reasons for this emigration abroad and its impact on Cuban society?

EL: Economic difficulties can be reflected in several ways, and one is migration. First of all, you know that when there is a social network in one place, it becomes easier to migrate to that place. When you look at the centers where there are more Mexicans in the United States today, they are those where Mexican communities settled: Los Angeles and elsewhere in California, Arizona… What are the communities where Puerto Ricans are established? New York.

Cubans in the United States settled in the place where they already had a community: Miami, whose stores the Batista elites and the middle classes liked to patronize before the revolutionary triumph. Then the U.S. government turned the migration issue into an instrument of subversion and discrimination and granted Cubans a privileged status to provoke an exodus. And it cannot be ignored, it is understandable, that in a suffocated country many people opt for an individual solution, and the individual solution is to go in search of a better life in Miami, the “paradise on earth.” In turn, that generates family pressure, because whoever leaves wants to take their children with them, and then, if they can, they take their mother with them, they do it. And that’s how it unfolded.

Cuba does not use immigration for political confrontation

In recent years, the Revolution had the audacity to not use the immigration issue as a mechanism for political confrontation, which was what the Yankees wanted.

Up until 2012, an average of 36,000 Cubans left the country each year, but that changed on January 14, 2013, when Cuba enacted a new migration law. The Miami mafia ventured to say that a new Mariel^[8] might be getting ready to fill Miami with communists. In the three years from 2013 to 2016 more than 670,000 people traveled outside the country; 522,600 (or 78%) of those did so for the first time, and only 60,300 (or 9% of those traveling in those three years) did not return (which translates to an average of 20,100 each year, or 55% of those who would have left before the new immigration law). Another fact: in 2016, 14,000 Cubans living abroad resettled in Cuba, with a preponderance of those over 50 years of age.

Despite all the progress made in bilateral ties, [former U.S. president Barack] Obama^[9] did not find the courage to change immigration policy. It was not until January 17, 2017, only 72 hours before leaving the Oval Office, that he repealed the “wet foot/dry foot” policy^[10] along with the program that promoted the defection of internationalist doctors.

According to U.S. records, in the decade since the George Walker Bush Jr.^[11] administration, 135,000 Cubans were favored with the “wet foot/dry foot” policy: 110,000 (81.5%) arrived through the border of Mexico and Canada; 15,000 in pirate vessels that circumvented naval patrols; and 10,000 traveled with a temporary visa and once in the United States chose to adjust their status to permanent resident.

Cuba is singled out by the number of emigrants going to the United States. It is worth asking: if Obama repealed the “wet foot/dry foot” policy, why did the numbers remain the same through the Mexican corridor?

The economic and financial regulations and provisions issued by the Trump administration to suffocate Cuba reached unprecedented levels of hostility. This included limiting family remittances to just $1,000 per quarter and eliminating the official mechanism under which more than $3.5 billion in remittances arrived in the country each year.

In terms of migration, the Trump administration policies paralyzed consular services and impacted thousands of Cubans in need of traveling to the United States for family reunification or visits, who then had to carry out the procedures in a third country incurring the added costs. It failed to comply with the obligation to grant no less than 20,000 visas per year ― a commitment that dated back to 1995 ― and in 2018 it made the decision to suspend the biannual talks meant to review the Migration Agreements.

Added to this are the consequences of the pandemic on a world economy that had still not recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, together with Biden’s decision to keep the measures dictated by Trump against the island intact, believing the Revolution was moribund.       

Obama decreed in 2017 an immigration directive that instructed the Department of Homeland Security not to grant parole to Cubans who entered the United States irregularly; therefore, they were not allowed to benefit from the Cuban Adjustment Act.^[12] It was Obama’s only provision that Trump respected.

But with Biden, things changed. On his orders, unlike the treatment of the rest of the undocumented immigrants who entered Mexico from Central America, the Department of Homeland Security began to release the newly arrived Cubans under a document they called “Order of Release on Recognizance” (that is, under the promise to appear in court when they were summoned).

In 2021, an Immigration judge in Miami ruled that the only power granted by the U.S. Supreme Court to the Department of Homeland Security to release newly arrived undocumented immigrants is to grant them parole; consequently, it equated parole with the “Order of Release on Recognizance.” From then on, other Immigration judges accepted that reading, so that Cubans without parole could continue to enjoy the exclusive treatment of the Cuban Adjustment Act.

‘Wet foot/dry foot’ policy remained in place

The “wet foot/dry foot” policy remained in place. José Pertierra explained it in an interview with the prestigious Cuban magazine Temas (Themes). Cubans “knew that just by setting foot on U.S. territory they would receive permanent residence in the United States, even without having to ask for asylum or allege persecution in their native country,” Pertierra pointed out.

Let’s put the data in context. According to the United Nation’s (UN) “World Migration Report 2022,” in 2020 there were 281 million international migrants in the world (3.6% of the world’s population). Europe is the main destination, followed by Asia and North America. With more than 51 million migrants, the United States ranks first as a destination, by far the highest number in the world. Immigrants from Mexico, India, and China make up the largest part, although with Andrés López Obrador,^[13] 1.9 million Mexicans returned to their country. On the other hand, the number of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras increased. There was also a notable increase from Venezuela.

In the last 15 years, the number of emigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean has risen from 7 million to 15 million. Mexico has the second highest figure in the world (only surpassed by India) with 11 million emigrants — most of them in the United States. In terms of proportion, the two countries with the most emigrants are Jamaica and El Salvador. Despite the privileges enjoyed by its citizens in the United States, Cuba ranks sixth in the region in proportion of emigrants to its population.

On January 9, 2023, the Federal Register published the regulation promulgated by Biden to close the border to Cubans trying to cross illegally. They would be expelled to Mexico or Cuba. If they had entered irregularly to apply for asylum, they had to do so online from a third country.

That text pointed to the blockade as the main factor responsible for what happened. It reads: “The Department of Homeland Security considers that the high — and growing — number of Cubans arriving at the southwest border and intercepted at sea responds to three factors: first, Cuba is experiencing its worst economic crisis in recent decades due to the long-lasting effects of Covid-19, high food prices, and economic sanctions.”

Do you want more cynicism than that? While the United States invested $3.2 billion in the economic infrastructure of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, to stop the migratory flow to its border, it did not take a single step to reduce the economic and financial escalation against Cuba by one iota.

There is a lot of hypocrisy. If you in the United States gave absolute freedom to Central Americans and Latin Americans — the same freedom and the same privileges given to Cubans — I assure you that there would be three times as many Mexicans, three times as many Central Americans, three times as many South Americans in the United States. The figures are right there.

Cubans have so many political, economic, and social privileges that a phenomenon has been created that is seldom explained here — people are surprised — and that is that most Cubans in Miami are the Latin American community that the rest of the Latin Americans in the United States despise. They consider them arrogant, stuck-up, and uncaring. In Latin America, any Cuban resident on the island is treated with the greatest affection and consideration; but when it comes to Cubans from Miami, as a rule they are looked at with contempt.

Unfortunately, this is the case, because it spreads. Part of our family and many of our friends are in Miami, good and noble people who for various reasons settled there, who love their nation and advocate for normalizing bilateral relations, although today with the danger of fascism in power there is a lot of fear of deportation and the typical abuses of the thugs in power.

Now with that migration, and with that combination of harassment, privilege, and also opportunities based on the flexibility of the Cuban migration policy, we have been drained of a lot of qualified personnel, many intelligent people, many people with a high degree of culture.

A country without sources of income, permanently accused, now without its historical leadership, at the harshest moment of its existence, sometimes when it’s time to make decisions in a certain place, it may not have the right person, it may not have the most capable person — because they are no longer here, because they have left — and then in many places, in many circumstances, mediocre people are making decisions, or people without the right culture, or people without the right experience. So, therefore, decisions are mediocre decisions, or they are decisions that lack a degree of culture, or at times lack knowledge.

You might say: “Well, there is an intelligent government policy, and yet there are difficulties in implementing that intelligent policy at the grassroots level.” There is a lack of coherence. And so, if in the middle of the most difficult circumstances you do not have the right person or someone with the moral leadership to decide or administer a policy, that often generates a greater problem.

In addition, many Cuban professionals are very intentionally being invited to study postgraduate courses in universities around the world where what prevails are neoliberal training programs — master’s degrees, doctorates. On their return, many come under that influence, and already among some academics there is an air of neoliberalism. But these segments are part of the university teaching system, they inform students. It can happen then — it is happening — that a technician who has excelled in a neoliberal university abroad, or has graduated in Cuba under that influence, makes decisions in an enterprise. And sometimes, certain decisions are unpopular because of their technocratic orientation.

Coupled with this, for several years now the department of Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Havana has been decimated, and today, when we most need political economy in our discussions, it is when the revolution has the least theoretical training in the subject of political economy.

The difficulties are gigantic

The difficulties are gigantic. How do we, in the midst of all these great difficulties, preserve the Revolution, preserve our compass?

It is a great battle. That great battle cannot be vertical — that great battle, which is ideological, which is political, which is cultural, is being waged by Díaz-Canel under the principles with which Fidel conceived the military war against the Yankees: based on the principles of the war of all the people. Therefore, today the most important battle within the revolution is the cultural battle in its broadest sense.

And that cultural battle has a battlefront in history, it has a battlefront in art, in literature, it has a battlefront in political communication. The policies have a central orientation, but we all must do our part — we have to put in the effort.

In any case, any solution depends on our decision to resist and win. We have the challenge of preventing neoliberalism from confusing our people, who are subjected to a colossal ideological bombardment by our neighbors and to the junk culture spread by the entertainment industry to exacerbate idiocy and consumerism.

In the face of such challenges, it is urgent to consolidate spirituality. Popular participation in the construction of the nation’s conceptual symbolism is an antidote to the apathy and indifference being sold to us as a model. And capturing the spirit of the country is born from the vocation of serving it with the neediest as a compass. Martí defined it in two verses: “With the poor of the earth / I want to cast my lot.” Fidel, by paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln: “This revolution of the humble, by the humble, and for the humble…”

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

NOTES

[1] The terms “anti-Cuban mafia” or “Cuban mafia in Miami” are often used by Cuban revolutionaries to refer to Cubans in the United States who left the country after the Cuban Revolution overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959 and opened the road to establishing a workers and farmers government and building a socialist society. Many of these Cubans, historically concentrated in Miami, have been vehemently opposed to the Cuban Revolution and have pushed for U.S. policies aimed at strangling Cuba and toppling its government.

[2] Ernesto Limia is referring here to the U.S. State Department’s list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT).

[3] Langley is the neighborhood in the town of McLean, Virginia, where the CIA headquarters is located. The name is commonly used as a designation for the CIA, the main U.S. spy agency around the world.

[4] For more information, see Cuba Sets Example in Confronting the Pandemic.

[5] During the early 1990s, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Cuba faced its first severe economic crisis since the victory of the 1959 revolution. Confronted with the cutoff of trade at preferential prices with the former Soviet Union, Cuba suddenly endured a 35% plunge in economic production (equal or greater than the decline of the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s). That period is often referred to as the “Special Period in Time of Peace.” At the same time, Washington intensified its economic warfare against Cuba as the Revolution tried to get new trading partners and sources of capital. Enemies of the Revolution everywhere predicted the “impending” collapse of the workers and farmers republic. Revolutionary minded working people, however, defended the socialist revolution in face of these difficulties showing the Cuban government remained their government. And they continued to reach out to the oppressed and exploited around the world aiding anti-imperialist and national liberation struggles.

[6] Miguel Díaz-Canel is the President of Cuba since 2019.

[7] José Martí — a revolutionary, poet, writer and journalist — is Cuba’s national hero. Martí founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892.

[8] The Mariel boatlift was a mass emigration of over 125,000 Cubans to the United States between April and October 1980, leaving from Cuba’s Mariel Harbor. It was triggered by a combination of economic hardship in Cuba and the decision by Cuba’s revolutionary government, led by Fidel Castro at the time, to allow any citizen who wished to leave to do so. The U.S. government accepted the arriving Cubans and gave them protected status under a special program. Mariel was the largest single migration of Cubans to the United States in history.

[9] The Obama administration took executive action to ease some restrictions on travel to Cuba by U.S. citizens, as well as restrictions on the import and export of goods between each country. At the same time, the U.S. embargo against Cuba, which can only be reversed by U.S. Congress, remained largely intact during the eight years of Obama’s presidency from 2008 to 2016.

[10] Under the U.S. government’s “wet-foot/dry-foot” policy, Cubans who reach U.S. soil are generally allowed to stay. Those caught at sea are almost always returned to the island.

[11] George W. Bush was U.S. president from 2001 to 2009.

[12] The Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 allows Cuban natives or citizens living in the United States who meet certain eligibility requirements to apply to become lawful permanent U.S. residents (get a green card).

[13] Andrés Manuel López Obrador was the 65^th president of Mexico from 2018 to 2024.

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