By Marxlenin Perez Valdes on February 2, 2026
foto: Bill Hackwell
There is something that U.S. leaders have historically failed to understand about Cubans, and that is that since the 19th century, our people have been fighting relentlessly to first obtain and then defend its freedom, sovereignty, and independence.
The ignorance of those in the North stems from their arrogance and superiority complex. The imperial mentality betrays those who harbor it, turning them into racists incapable of putting themselves in someone else’s shoes, especially if they view the other as inferior; an other who has no rights, because they are only allowed to exist as a subordinate, a slave, or a lackey.
That is why “the imperialist lords,” as Fidel also ironically called them, have been unable to understand that this is a heroic people, built on the basis of national rebellion, character, courage, love of country, and the determination to be free or martyrs.
Our history of insubordination to the status quo began 158 years ago, not in 1959, but on October 10, 1868, at the edge of a machete. Since then, we have been shaping ourselves as subversive subjects in the face of abuse, foreign interference, exploitation, domination, injustice, capitalist imperialism…
They, the interventionists of yesterday who are the same as today, did not understand at the time the height and magnitude of the Baraguá Protest. They do not see that Maceo is part of the collective subjectivity, just like Céspedes and Martí, and later Mella, Villena, Guiteras, Fidel, and so many other brave Cubans who founded this nation.
They did not realize in time that the Republic founded in 1902, by the neocolonialists and the bourgeoisie, was not the one we wanted but the one they allowed us to have, and that it was only a matter of time and of consolidating the revolutionary struggle before the triumph of a homeland more in line with the ideals of that Liberation Army, that of the redeeming jungle where it all began.
The rulers of the United States, in their arrogance, also failed to understand the significance of the 1959 triumph, and that is why they have been unable to grasp why this people (whom they have been trying to subjugate for centuries) have not renounced their determination of homeland or death.
It has been in the National Anthem since the beginning of our anti-imperialist struggles: “to die for the homeland is to live.” But they, monotonous as they are, only know one anthem and only recognize one flag; the rest do not count, we do not count.
They believed that the Revolution of ’59 would be eliminated with the old methods of military invasions: they were defeated. They bet on economic pressure, unilateral coercive measures, biological warfare, economic blockade, etc., but they have not succeeded either: the Revolution exists, it is alive, it breathes, it feels and it thinks. If this were not the case, they would not be threatening us again.
They decided to isolate us from the “modern” world and have been betting on that for 67 years with their policy of economic warfare (which is also political, ideological, communicational, cultural, and imperial warfare).
What have they achieved with this? They have hurt us, of course, and there is what we were (and what we experienced) as a society while the world was organized on the basis of solidarity and communism under the umbrella of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and what we have been since its disintegration plunged the international order into a unipolar dynamic.
However, they have also failed to realize that this isolation has had a significant impact on the type of subjectivity possessed by our people. That isolation and, above all, our sovereign decision to be different through socialism (knowing what its consequences are against monetary-commercial relations and the whole logic of capital) have conditioned a type of citizen that does not resemble the common citizen of the 21st century, even though we are equally alienated and dazzled by commodity fetishism.
And we are not different in the petulant sense that they practice of believing ourselves to be better, or worse, but because our conditions have been very particular based on their plan to distance us from all access to new technologies, “development,” digital capitalism, the Internet of Things… We should thank them for not making us compulsive consumers in the empire of commodities, passive beings alien to politics.
This isolation to which the US blockade has subjected us, with emphasis after the collapse of the Socialist Camp, has contributed—unconsciously—to the fact that those ideals and roots of insurrectionary struggle do not seem remote or strange to us. The less capitalism, the greater the presence of the indigenous, of the history of the homeland, of what is truly Cuban.
We are political citizens and—why not?—politicized, and the best of our insurrectionary traditions is in our consciousness. All it takes is for them to threaten to wipe us off the map for everything that inhabits our subjectivity, our DNA, to be activated and multiplied.
What a lack of creativity on the part of Yankee imperialism! They pulled the specter of communism out of the Cold War trunk. They say that fashion is cyclical when there is a lack of original and new ideas. It seems that the same thing is happening to the Trump-Marco Rubio duo: they don’t know what to invent to make us surrender, so they are recycling old slogans.
In short, they don’t understand us, they never have; they don’t have that capacity. So, to help them, we say: “We don’t understand each other.”
As Fidel said in similar conditions of war to those we find ourselves in today: “We may be an invaded people, but we will never be defeated.” Cuba is Cuba, and we have proven this throughout our existence: No one surrenders here!