This is the transcript of a discussion taking place on the Global Research News Hour for May 16, 2025.

Luis Toledo Sande is a Cuban writer, researcher and journalist. PhD in Philological Sciences from the University of Havana. Author of several books of different genres. He has taught at the university and has been director of the Center for Martí Studies and deputy director of the magazine Casa de las Américas.

In diplomacy, he has served as cultural counselor of the Cuban Embassy in Spain. Among other recognitions, he has received the Distinction for National Culture and the Social Sciences Critics Award, the latter for his book Cesto de llamas. Biography of José Martí. (Velasco, Holguín, 1950).

Luis Toledo Sande: These have been the last 10 most complex years for Cuba, because on the one hand, the Socialist Camp and the Soviet Union, which was to a large extent the commercial support of the Cuban Revolution, had already been dismantled and capitalism has festered in the world, which has to do with the tightening of a blockade that has lasted more than 60 years, but in recent years, especially after Trump’s first term in office, it has worsened with very strong measures against Cuba.

We have to start because Cuba had and has a great need and it would be fair to lift the blockade, therefore that necessarily raises hopes in Cuba when talking about the possibility of lifting the blockade.

Two or three days after Obama’s and Raul Castro’s statements, I wrote an article entitled: “The United States, Another Stage,” which is published in Cuba Debate, in that December 2014 warning about the fact that we should not have any unrestricted hope, nor expect any kindness from the Empire. Not hope. If in Cuba someone had or we had any inordinate hope, on that fact it was our responsibility and also that fact of having hopes. But Obama himself said that he was trying to do by other means what the blockade had not achieved, because according to Obama, with all his imperial cynicism, the blockade had not achieved what he was looking for.

If, with all the damage that the blockade had done to Cuba, it had not achieved what it sought, it was clear that what Obama wanted was to crush us completely and the blockade had not achieved that. If we did not know how to read that, if someone did not know how to read that, it is the responsibility of those who did not know how to read Obama’s message. Because there was a lot of hope. I remember some readers who said that we wanted to bite the hand that came to give us food, something that is already a total aberration of thought.

Moreover, Obama acknowledges that the blockade was isolating the US more than Cuba. Isolating it from what? From a continent like our America and the Caribbean, where there was a progressive heyday – let’s say progressive to understand – which was contrary to the US, and in that heyday the situation in Cuba was very well understood and Cuba was supported, therefore ways had to be sought to ensure that the US was not left aside, they still consider that Latin America has to be their area of influence, and if the blockade weakened that area of influence, they had to change their policy.

Global Research: After 2014, just three months after, Obama said that he launched murderous sanctions against Venezuela for the national security of the United States, and I’m wondering if that kind of off-path, does it ruin the truce that’s being established in this normalization or thaw process.

LTS: There were also many of us, certainly the Cubans who understood that this was Obama’s game, we understood it. And we were not alone, to name a good company that those of us who thought that, it is enough to name Fidel Castro, who was always clear about what the Empire was looking for. He was clear since December 2014, he was clear when Obama visited Cuba in 2016, and he published when Obama left, “Brother Obama”, with all the ironic charge that the word brother has, at that time. Those of us who I think were clear about what was happening had Fidel Castro as a companion. Although we did not know it, we sensed it.

Obama, on the other hand, is not an isolated case. Obama must be placed in a tradition of evil and “goodness” in quotation marks, which comes from long before with Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, which later had in Kennedy, the same one who had authorized the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, had in Kennedy a continuity and came to have in Obama, the closing of a perverse, fearful and cunning trio. I believe that Obama must be placed in that tradition.

And it is not a case of Safe Made Man as a politician, he has his cunning, he has his intelligence, an intelligent and sinister man, but he is also the fruit of the tactics of a system, which was already the Good Neighbor policy of Roosevelt, the Alliance for Progress, in quotation marks, of Kennedy, and Obama comes to announce, to speak of a change of policy in particular, and at the same time he is given, from the beginning of his presidency he is given the Nobel Peace Prize, which served him as a license to intensify the aggressive policy of the United States, and to have against Africa the policy he had against Africa, and to be one of the US presidents associated with the greatest number of wars. I believe that this is not an isolated case.

Who wants to see can see.

I believe that Raul Castro played the role of the political leader of a Cuba in need of the blockade to be lifted and with the need not to do or say anything that seemed to be aimed at stopping this action.

Let us bear in mind that one of the accusations made against Cuba, against the Cuban revolution, is that Cuba is interested in maintaining the blockade to justify its shortcomings. And Cuba showed that it is not interested in maintaining the blockade, because it even facilitated Obama’s visit to Cuba, it gave him the option to express himself freely in a theater, that is a topic for another conversation, but it was clear that Cuba was not interested in maintaining the blockade. It was not necessary to wait until three months later, when Obama made the statements, to know what Obama was saying about Venezuela.

The fact is that Obama left Havana for Buenos Aires, in Macri’s Argentina, to orchestrate the war against Venezuela. It is of a sinister and evil cunning: he tried to neutralize Cuba with the offer of a possible elimination of the blockade, with the promise of a possible normalization of relations, he tried to neutralize it so that Cuba would not continue protesting against the Empire.

Let us remember that Cuba was the main spearhead of Latin American progressivism together with Venezuela, let us remember that Venezuela was the natural replacement in the continent for Fidel Castro with Chavez, let us remember that, and on the other hand Venezuela was an important ally for Cuba and on the other hand.

To leave Havana when it is trying to neutralize Cuba for Argentina, to orchestrate the political and economic war against Venezuela, which they are going to declare as a major danger that they are going to declare him as a major danger to the security of the United States, was a very visible maneuver by Obama for those who wanted to see it. The Cuban government saw that, it does not occur to me to think that the Cuban government did not see that, but a lot of people did not see that, because they were enamored with the idea that Obama came to Cuba to relations.

I would like to make clear in the translation the difference we make between blocking and embargo.

GR: I’d like to talk about some articles you wrote in the past about Cubans, the greater set of Cubans, who were wearing flags of the United States as shirts. And you even had photos of these flag shirts. Could you comment on the significance of this popular display?

LTS: Yes, it is a matter of concern. Yes, tomorrow in the Catholic temples, in the honest religious temples will begin to arrive faithful with the devil’s t-shirts. I believe that the honest churches should feel alarmed, I believe that Cuba should feel worried. There is a lot of unpreparedness. There is a lot of ignorance of believing that this is not important, a lot of cosmopolitanism in quotation marks, but I am sure that behind this there is a lot of influence to stimulate. Why in the containers that come to Cuba with clothes to sell, recycled or not, why so many shorts and shorts with the U.S. flag and shoes with the U.S. flag.

This is not a coincidence. Because the ideological outpost, the devil on the T-shirt of the faithful, is a way to break, unless the image has underneath it A Devil Down, or Die the Devil. If you put on an image of the devil it is a way of breaking the religious faith. In the case of Cuba, this proliferation of flags can be a danger of cracking, of ideological fissure, of fissure of concept, in the patriotic principles. We should know that the flag of the United States is not just another flag.

Tomorrow I find a Burundi flag and I like it and I wear it, but Burundi is not attacking Cuba. The US is attacking Cuba and humanity. And how are the USA attacking Cuba, maintaining the blockade and attacking Cuba, let’s think about which are the USA that now more visibly have a war against the world, which is secondary to the support they give to Zionist Israel that is massacring the people of Palestine.

Curiously, the two governments that remain constant in voting against the UN resolution condemning the blockade of Cuba are the US and Israel. This is a very clear alliance, and if we Cubans in Cuba are not capable of having that clarity, we may be in danger of having severe ideological confusion.

I want to believe that those Cubans who walk around with the little flag are not even remotely the majority of Cubans, but they are very visible. You go inside Cuba to a conglomerate of a thousand people who are not carrying any flag and there are 3 people carrying the US flag and that is what you see, that is what attracts attention because it is incongruent, it is what is against, and they also know that this image is important, defending the importance of the image, that if it were not so, Donald Trump would not have put in his social networks, in his social vines, this montage of him dressed as the Pope, because that is a way of telling the world that he can be the Pope of humanity.

He already said it, I can be a good pope because I want to be a good pope. He already said it, I can be a good Pope because I want to be the Pope of all religions, the dominator, the Caesar of the whole world. That mixture of that time when the Pope could be the head of the Church, of the Empire and the one who decided and oriented the forces of the Crusades, that is what Donald Trump wanted to do. 

GR: You wrote an article, it was March 8th of this year, having to do with the 60th anniversary speech of Fidel Castro on November 17th, 2005 at Aula Magna, University of Havana. And you mentioned a lot of the things in there. But one thing he also mentioned that stood out for me was the fact that there was corruption. That this is something that is recognized. And I was wondering if you could comment on whether his ideas are outdated, or is it potentially anticipating what might be coming twenty years later.

LTS: Well, I am not an oracle, I am not a seer, I am a reader and I try to observe reality. Fidel was not an oracle either, but he was a man of great foresight, as was Jose Marti, to speak of another Cuban. And when he talks about corruption, I don’t think he is talking about concrete cases of corruption that were already known or were not known or were supposed to be happening in Cuba, but he already had very clear information on his side about what had happened to socialism in Europe and in the Soviet Union. We always talk about Europe and the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union was part of Asia and part of Europe.

He already knew where the corruption and the estrangement between the government and the masses, between the Party and the masses, had led, which resulted in the dismantling of socialism, and therefore, it was already known that socialism was not irreversible, because it had become fashionable that socialism was irreversible. I always wondered because in history nothing is irreversible, because everything can be reversed, and I also believe that it is a danger for politics to consider that a political project is irreversible, because what happened with the Titanic could happen, which was supposed to be invulnerable and therefore the necessary rivets were not put on it. It is a hypothesis.

Not enough lifeboats were put on the Titanic, because as she was invulnerable, no measures had to be taken. On the first crossing the Titanic broke up and sank. If it had not been considered impregnable and more safety measures had been taken, probably either it would not have sunk or there would not have been so many deaths. But socialism was considered irreversible and it was proven one day, even for those who knew that it is not reversible, one day it was proven that it was not. The Soviet Union was dismembered and the European Socialist Camp collapsed, that disintegrated and converted to capitalism and without a shot, well the shots had happened before, but that happened in the end.

And Fidel Castro, who was a man trying to save a country, trying to save a country in progress, fears that this could happen in Cuba and warns against it. Not in the abstract, not in the abstract. And he warns against it so much that he has learned from what happened in Europe and in the Soviet Union, he says that our external enemies will not be able to destroy Cuba but we ourselves could destroy it from within, because of such great evils as corruption. What Fidel said in 2005, 5 years after he gave the speech where he made public his concept of Revolution, was no longer an abstract theory, it was the result of what had happened in countries more powerful than Cuba. If that was dismembered, we should assume that Cuba, with far fewer resources, would go through the same thing.

GR: In that context as well as the current difficulties in terms of high inflation, the income going down. Haiti is the only other country in the Western Hemisphere more impoverished than Cuba right now. And also in 2021 there was a major demonstration, maybe the biggest demonstration since the special period in the 1990s, reflecting on the economic and poverty of the people and so on. I was wondering how you could evaluate the recent May 1 demonstration?

LTS: Well, we have low salaries, there are countries that do not even have salaries, that is an exaggeration, but there are countries that do not even have salaries. I think that what explains May 1st of this year in Cuba, that is a really great depth.

Because it means that the Cuban people who went there voluntarily, who were there with an attitude of festivity that went beyond what I expected. I expected to see support for the Cuban revolution, but what I saw there left me moved. I was there with some friends from my building and we were talking about it. These are people who really have a powerful intuition.

What we were discussing there was not whether or not to increase the quota of rice for the population, what was being discussed there was whether it was necessary for the Revolution to survive, which had achieved for the Cuban people standards of living and standards of development in education, public health, science and sports like never before. Or if it was necessary to go there to demand a little more public transportation or to go there to condemn the blockade and imperialism which are the forces that are keeping us without public transportation. And the Cuban people went there, and they went there with joy.

No one was there, neither forced, nor punished, nor threatened. It is not possible to see such a festive, joyful atmosphere in the midst of the misfortunes of the world. It is not possible. That had a great impact. It had a great impact on the enemy.

There is a little video of a montage of the Devil with one of the fascist leaders, from Germany with his General Staff, representing the US embassy in Cuba, saying that the information had deceived them. Because they had been told that nobody was going to go. That the Cuban revolution continued to have significant mass support, which was the reason for the blockade, which was to leave the Cuban government without support.

The memorandum of the US agent who gave guidance on how to establish the blockade, gave guidance that it was so that there would be hardship, so that salaries would not be sufficient, so that there would be hunger and that the people would rebel against the government, because the government had massive majority support. And that May 1st showed that this blockade has not succeeded in making the Cuban people complain, that the Cuban people are frank, sincere, free and say whatever they want, even if they protest afterwards, they know that in essence where the causes of the hardships lie.

And those causes are fundamentally, without discounting our deficiencies, the corruption that may exist, without discounting the work of the opportunists that exist in any part of the world, the greatest effect of the Cuban hardships is in the hostility of the US against Cuba, against the Revolution and against the Cuban people. 

GR: Because Cuba is such a unique country, and there are different complexities that outsiders won’t understand, I’m wondering if you could maybe explain your role as a journalist, as a Revolutionary journalist. What are the principal characteristics of a journalist like yourself?

LTS: Well, I think that everyone, whether as a writer or as a journalist, professor, diplomat, the main role that one has is first of all to be sincere. You cannot help your family if you are not sincere with your family, if you do not warn your family, if you do not recognize the virtues of your family and do not point out the mistakes and defects. So it is not a question of turning the intellectual into the conscience here of humanity.

No. Every citizen should always warn against wrongdoing, confront wrongdoing, suggest, if possible, ways to eradicate wrongdoing, and if wrongdoing is not eradicated, it is not because he has not done what is necessary, what is within his reach to rectify it. I believe that modestly that is the role of each one of us. Above all, a human being is a human being. A human being must help his country to achieve and conquer the fruits it deserves and if it does not conquer it, because the world does not favor it, it should not be because he has not put his shoulder first of all to participate in the work and furthermore, to warn what he has to warn.

Is Cuba going to achieve what Cuba deserves to achieve? Well, it is not certain because just as nothing is irreversible, nothing is fatally achievable and besides, I am not sure that there is a country in the world that has time to rebuild a social system before the world is destroyed.

I don’t want to be apocalyptic, far from it, but the destruction of the world is a much less remote possibility now than it used to be. Not only because of disease, not only because of climate change which is one of the great dangers we have. 7

There is a danger of war. What is happening in front of the world with the Palestinians who are being massacred day after day, day after day, and it may happen that in the midst of that destruction a US president goes to the Gaza Strip to say that he would build his own resort there, his own hotel chain, is a symbol of moral shamelessness but also the danger of the world destroying itself thinking that the powerful are indestructible as well. Of course, if the world is destroyed and there are 25 powerful people what are they going to eat.

A human being is above all a human being. Every human being, as the Greek classics already knew, is a political being and that political being has to contribute to make the best policy for his people, whether he achieves it or not. That he does not achieve it is not his responsibility. At least he has tried. And speaking more modestly, individual forces are small for all that is required to transform a country.

GR: Understanding what Cuba is going through, anything else you’d like to say before we close the conversation?

LTS: Cuba has been forced by circumstances to make changes, in its mode of production and its way of administration, in the diversification of property, in the expansion of private property throughout the country, to make a series of changes that I would like to see all of them serve to truly improve the Cuban people, to lay the foundations of the Cuban nation and not become a Trojan horse for the Cuban nation.

To be alert against this is a responsibility for all patriots and for all revolutionaries and for decent people.

And I want to end by thinking that hope must be cultivated. Hope that does not come and is not received from the air but that we have to cultivate it, remembering a maxim of religious origin that says “A Dios rogando y con el mazo dando.” (To God begging and with a sledgehammer giving). If we do not work for things to change and change for the better, because Fidel Castro in his concept said to change everything that must be changed. He did not say change everything, nor change it badly, nor change it irresponsibly. It is to change everything that should be changed.

And on the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion, it is a revolution of the humble by the humble and for the humble to achieve what Jose Marti called the human goal of well-being and decency.

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