The following is an expanded and revised version of the interview entitled “¿Y las distorsiones políticas? Conversación con el filósofo Wilder Pérez Varona,” which was conducted by Ariel Dacal Díaz and published in the “Sin Permiso” section of OnCuba News on December 22, 2025. This new version by Dacal Díaz and Pérez Varona is published on Communis with the authorization of OnCuba News.
“In Cuba, we are in a transitional period, and the uncertainty of our future direction is what intensifies the conflict. This is not a classic transition with clear replacement forces, but rather a cumulative crisis in which the certainties of the old order are collapsing, and a new horizon has yet to stabilize.”
— Wilder Pérez Varona
A Conversation with Wilder Pérez Varona
Thinking Cuba today is like walking on ground where the map no longer matches the territory. There is constant talk of “economic distortions,” but what about the “political distortions” that not least condition our reality?
Words that we have used for decades and that we continue using to describe these very different times seem worn out — or at least insufficient — to explain our daily Cuban experience. The Cuban crisis is not just about shortages of food and medicine, a lack of transportation, suffocating inflation, or the collapse of the electrical system. It is also a crisis of meaning, legitimacy, and horizons.
To help unravel these tensions beyond the daily urgency, I spoke with Cuban philosopher Wilder Pérez Varona. He has devoted time to researching and analyzing what he considers to be disputed imaginaries in Cuba. He invites us to look beyond the usual polarization and understand the historical density of Cuba’s current political moment.
***
Ariel Dacal Díaz
Let’s start with the basics because academic terms can sometimes distance us from the average citizen. What do we mean by “political imaginary” in today’s Cuba?
Wilder Pérez Varona
Look, to put it in “Cuban terms,” what we are talking about is the different and often starkly opposing ways in which we perceive and process where we are and where we are headed as a country, what is fair, dignified, desirable, but also what is possible, in a moral and material context that does not offer much scope for reaching a consensus that would renew the social pact achieved and maintained for a long time by the Revolution. What we are talking about is the “shared grammar” that allows us to live together and that organizes people’s expectations, hopes, and fears in a coherent manner. In that sense, we are not talking about anything different from what happens elsewhere, but with the caveat that, until very recently, it would have been inconceivable that Cuba would be in the situation it finds itself in today and that we would be asking ourselves such distressing questions and considering answers so unconvincing that they fail to satisfy a new majority.
For decades, words such as “revolution,” “independence,” “equality,” “dignity”… and so many others served as a powerful glue, binding social experience and uniting people around a sense of belonging in a project of national emancipation. This project was simultaneously a concrete plan for social, economic, and material development, as well as imagining and implementing new ways of living, creating, doing politics, and relating to one another at all levels: at home, at school, at work, and in the space of interaction between rulers and ruled. These were not just slogans or ideological abstractions. They were imperfect but tangibly improvable realities backed by concrete measures and advances, such as agrarian and urban reforms, literacy campaigns, universal access to quality health and education services, and the promotion of gender and racial equality. Something less talked about but equally important was a cultural explosion, a blossoming of high and popular culture, unprecedented in Latin America. We all knew what these words meant and what was expected of us when we heard them, and there was a palpable correspondence between the discourse of sacrifice, on the one hand, and social welfare, a manifest social equality, and a mutual recognition in that equality, on the other. Above all, there was confidence in the proven fact that under no circumstances would the State abandon anyone, especially the most humble, to their fate. This was the fundamental principle and the seal of the pact.
The problem today is that this glue has dried up. These words can no longer bring together the experiences of most people in a (self-)recognizable political community. Everyday life is increasingly disrupted and thrown off balance by precariousness, insecurity, and inequalities. The horizon of social mobility is also very different from what it was during the three decades of socialism supported, subsidized, and in some ways guaranteed by the Soviet Union. To many, the official discourse of “continuity” or “resistance” sounds hollow because their daily lives are marked by the scarcity or inaccessibility of basic goods and services that were once taken for granted: endless lines, exhausting power outages, inadequate wages or pensions, and the feeling that no effort translates into real progress or effective rights. Or, at a deeper level, that Cuba is not a “normal” country, that it no longer moves in step with any other process outside its borders.
If we look at it with a little more distance, or at least from a regional perspective, it’s clear that in crisis is not just a way of governing and managing the country, but also a way of imagining the relationship between the State, citizenship, and equality. This crisis is more visible in Cuba because the promises and realities of equality had a profound impact, and the language of the Revolution was able to sustain itself as a hegemonic and truthful narrative for a long time, facing almost no competition from opposing or alternative discourses.
ADD: The debate is often reduced to pure economics. “The problem is that there is no money, money has no real purchasing power, there is no oil, and there are no resources. The blockade is getting tighter rather than loosening.” Why do you insist on a crisis of imagination and legitimacy rather than a crisis of management or resources?
WPV: Because economic problems are concrete facts that respond to concrete conditions, not so much to differing perceptions or interpretations. However, what gives perseverance in the face of such difficulties a compensatory, so to speak, and even “redemptive” meaning, allowing people to endure or justify them in the name of a greater project, is the imagination that organizes that experience. Without that framework of meaning, scarcity ceases to be a shared sacrifice and is perceived as an injustice or abuse.
When that symbolic framework breaks down, waiting in line for bread becomes an unbearable waste of time that robs you of your life. The State loses the ability to transform everyday reality into a coherent narrative that unites the majority; people continue to wait in line but no longer view it as part of a collective effort. Instead, they see it as evidence of the State’s poor management and the breakdown of the social contract.
This had a very clear trigger in recent economic policy. The so-called Tarea Ordenamiento — by unifying the currency, rationalizing prices, and cutting subsidies — more than a poorly-conceived policy turned out to be an untimely and mismanaged reform that triggered inflation and disrupted the wage system. It was also, above all, a political blow to the heart of the social pact because it introduced regressive redistribution into a system that, until then, had been legitimized by the principle and the practice of social equality. It deepened unprecedented wage gaps, weakened the purchasing power of the State sector, and shifted the cost of adjustment to vulnerable families and groups. In practice, the State eroded its own legitimacy and jeopardized the social contract between rulers and ruled, between the Revolution as a transmissible, renewable project, and the realities of an embattled country that never achieved economic success beyond the social justice it had attained.
In short, if the State salary no longer provides protection, equality is an increasingly distant memory that is becoming an abstraction, and social justice survives only in discourse or the memories of older generations, what remains of the original contract that justified sacrifice, unity, and political discipline? These kinds of questions cannot be resolved by changing economic policy alone because they touch on the root of the political imagination that organized life in Cuba for decades.
ADD: Traditionally, we have been sold the idea of two irreconcilable sides: revolution versus counterrevolution. Does this framework still help us understand what is happening today, or are we missing something in between?
WPV: This framework has become a straitjacket that no longer helps anyone understand the country. Even though the official discourse insists on using it to entrench itself and simplify things by reducing conflicts to two terms or two poles. For a long time, it functioned as a device of order. If you were “with the Revolution,” you had a place. If you were “against” it, you were left out. The truth is that, to a greater or lesser extent, most people were with the Revolution for the reasons I mentioned earlier. Politically speaking, the Revolution had become “naturalized” to the point that it was difficult, if not impossible, to separate the Revolution from the country in people’s minds. Today, Cuban social reality has evolved beyond that binary opposition. Awareness and knowledge of the outside world have also gone beyond such binary opposition and polarization.
The current political landscape is a complex and contradictory mosaic. Of course, there is an opposition linked to regime-change agendas and, in that sense, to the United States’ ever aggressive policy toward Cuba. This policy provides the opposition with external funding, media infrastructure, political and diplomatic support, and — like it or not — channels it toward achieving explicit objectives for transitioning to a liberal order dependent on and subordinate to the United States. None of this is a secret. However, reducing all dissent to this nefarious and increasingly dangerous segment is a form of voluntary blindness that obscures other actors and overlooks conflicts arising from unfulfilled or interrupted promises of the revolutionary project (whether due to unrealistic expectations, missed opportunities, or a lack of knowledge and capacity to achieve them).
Consider what has happened in recent years: cultural and artistic movements fight for freedom of creation and against censorship without necessarily advocating for the restoration of capitalism. Spontaneous citizen protests amplify material, civil, and political demands in working-class neighborhoods. Feminist, anti-racist, animal rights, and LGBTIQ+ movements expose inequalities and violence hidden by the narrative of universal equality. A critical and socialist left, both on and off the island, defends Cuba’s independence and sovereignty while advocating for the democratization of the country. This left does not simply copy or impose the well-known political and ideological script of historically documented post-communist transitions. It denounces authoritarianism, corruption, and the corporate capture of the economy.
The Cuban State and government continues making the tragic mistake of lumping all of this together with “mercenaries,” “annexationists,” and “confused individuals.” By criminalizing feminists, “independent” journalists, neighborhood activists, media figures, and external political operatives alike, the government erases nuances, closes off dialogue and questioning, and radicalizes groups that could be social and political allies in implementing democratizing reforms, even if those reforms would eventually be carried out mainly from above. The Cuban conflict is not a mere ideological echo of the Cold War but rather a complex dispute over the redefinition of the equation whereby social justice, citizens’ rights, civil space in which society and the State feed off each other, and national independence and sovereignty can coexist in conditions of structural crisis and external siege.
ADD: You touched on a key point: the critical left and those intermediate actors. Around 2017, there was a lot of talk about “centrism” as a threat to the system. Why do you think the system is so hostile to those who try to nuance or propose dialogue?
WPV: Because the Cuban political system has operated under a logic of “monolithic unity” for almost seven decades. This logic does not allow for or know how to process difference, even when it comes from within its own ideological camp. What may have once been a matter of life and death in conditions that were very different from today’s — think of Cuba from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, when the provisional rule ended and the country’s party, government, and State spheres were institutionalized, opening a period of stability that lasted until the fall of the USSR — that which at one time was a natural necessity, that is, defending the country’s survival at all costs in conditions of radical revolution and siege, ended up becoming second nature. In that light, the campaign against “centrism” was less a theoretical debate and more a political operation to delegitimize any position seeking gradual, orderly socialist reforms while at the same time criticizing authoritarianism and the lack of authentic, popular socialist democracy.
For the bureaucracy, socialist and even communist critics are sometimes more problematic than long-standing or newly minted radical opponents of the revolutionary project because they dispute the language of the Revolution. They remind the bureaucracy that social justice, material equality, and popular sovereignty — which is nothing more than the effective participation of the population in the management of their own affairs, “effective” meaning in this case not merely a formal exercise of a legally enshrined electoral system —were concrete aspirations and promises, not just ideological banners to negotiate the gap between reality and utopia in discourse. When someone says, “I want socialism, but with democracy and pluralism,” they address the ethical core of the project and recall that there are alternatives to the dichotomy of “either socialism as it exists or savage capitalism.”
In response, the State has activated what Julio César Guanche calls an “algorithm of delegitimization.” This algorithm automatically labels any dissent, regardless of its origin or destination, as a threat to the country’s unity and national security. This approach treats all criticism as if it aligns with Washington’s agenda. This algorithm silences all critical voices, leaving the system listening only to its own echo and therefore losing its capacity for diagnosis and correction, as when faced with explosions of unrest it can no longer head off or process. This occurred on July 11, 2021, when mass protests overwhelmed the control repertoire and information monopoly, showing the extent to which discontent had accumulated.
For observers in other countries, it is important to understand that there is intense internal conflict within Cuba’s socialist and communist left. The State’s refusal to engage with this conflict is pushing progressive sectors toward positions that are increasingly distant from the State. This does not necessarily mean an alignment with conservative or neoliberal agendas.
ADD: You mentioned new actors, and technology has played a key role in this regard. How does politics change when many people have cell phones and social media accounts that give them access to various networks and platforms?
WPV: It changed the rules of the game in ways the State itself did not anticipate. For almost six decades, the Cuban State centrally and monopolistically administered symbolic production: the press, radio, television, cinema, publishing system, educational and cultural institutions, and spaces for debate were all structured around the idea of national unity and the authority of the official narrative. Beginning in 2018, mass internet connectivity opened a crack in that architecture. For the first time in decades, the State lost its monopoly on the production of “truth.”
The internet broke the information blockade, creating a counter-public sphere where ordinary citizens document endless lines, prolonged blackouts, gratuitous and counterproductive acts of repression, and instances of corruption. Journalists, academics, activists, influencers, and experts alike circulate diagnoses that bypass the official media’s filter. Politics ceased to be confined to institutions and speeches broadcast by official media outlets. Instead, it began to occur in real time through live broadcasts, social media threads, Telegram channels, and podcasts that blend firsthand accounts, economic analysis, political commentary, and satire.
A current example of this is the exchange rate published by the digital media outlet El Toque. The government accuses them of “financial terrorism” and algorithmic manipulation, while the self-proclaimed independent media outlet retorts that its calculation reflects a deregulated and fragmented exchange market where the Cuban peso has lost its reference value. Ultimately, ordinary citizens and MSMEs use that data to decide what prices to set for selling, buying, or saving. That data, rather than the official rate, organizes everyday economic life. In this case, El Toque‘s political agenda matters less than the Cuban State’s ability, or lack thereof, to respond to information that is difficult or impossible to refute.
This implies a loss of real power for the State because it is no longer the sole entity defining the basic parameters of economic reality. Hence the smear campaign, attempts to regulate the informal exchange market, and digital control measures. Behind the conflict over the exchange rate lies a broader dispute over who has the authority to define the crisis and establish what is “realistic” in the Cuban economy.
ADD: You mention the tension between the “ethos of sacrifice” and the new consumer mindset. How do young people process this reality?
WPV: The rhetoric of sacrifice — the idea of postponing present well-being for a brighter future — was effective when there was a shared sense of historical mission, an epic sensibility, and a collective disposition that served as a self-regulating scale of values and a form of collective catharsis. This was also true when there was a welfare State that protected people from the worst forms of precariousness, despite its limitations. However, for a 20-year-old today, the Sierra Maestra, Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis, the Ten Million Ton Harvest, and even Angola are photos in a history book or references in TV series and documentaries that do not connect with their daily lives.
Younger generations have been socialized in scarcity but also in the global culture of consumption through screens. They see how people live elsewhere, they compare, and they imagine other paths. For them, desiring designer clothing or sneakers, stable internet access, or the ability to emigrate is not an “ideological deviation” or a betrayal of their homeland. It is a fundamental aspiration for normality and even dignity in a world where mobility is an assumed generational expectation.
They live in a kind of “gentrified sociality,” in which status and the possibility of a life project are defined by access to foreign currency, often through remittances or jobs related to tourism or positions abroad. In this sociality, the conceptions of success and failure are reorganized around this disparity. Official discourse asks them for understanding, patience, and resilience while appealing to resorts in a distant past or an unthinkable future. At the same time, their reality demands dollars and transnational survival strategies.
If the national project does not provide a feasible way to achieve these life aspirations on the island — including consumption, participation, being heard, and deciding their own future — the response will be what we are already witnessing: mass migration functioning as a silent referendum on the country’s political and economic model’s viability.
ADD: Cuba has always been influenced by the outside world. Now, however, that relationship seems to have taken on new contours, content, and dynamics. How does the diaspora fit into this equation?
WPV: Today, the diaspora is an unavoidable actor and interlocutor. We cannot continue to view emigration through the lens of the Cold War as a sort of “fifth column of the enemy” or, at best, as “the wallet” that sends remittances to sustain domestic consumption. The diaspora has become an integral part of the nation — what some authors call an “expanded Cuban identity” — that extends beyond the borders of the State.
Today, the nation is an expanded, transboundary space in which not only remittances, but also affections, chains of care, political ideas, and hybrid cultures circulate. Cuban identity is constructed and contested in Havana, Hialeah, Madrid, Mexico City, Santiago de Chile, digital networks, and everyday practices. This transnationality breaks the State’s ability to exercise territorial control over its citizens. People may live in Cuba, but they manage their survival with resources, links, and references from outside the country.
This has a profound impact on political affiliations and loyalty. If the State no longer ensures basic living conditions, and a transnational family network provides your food, healthcare, and the opportunity to emigrate, what does citizenship mean? Who do you perceive as your true source of security and a better future? Is it the State that asks you to make sacrifices or the family that sends you remittances and opens doors for you in another country? Furthermore, the diaspora is not homogeneous. It includes historical exiles who have always opposed the revolutionary project and any idea of socialism. It also includes new waves of migrants who do not identify with that narrative. However, they also do not recognize themselves in the Cuban State’s official discourse. This multiplies the conflicting ideas about “what to do with Cuba.”
ADD: You also mention the 2019 Constitution as a moment of “productive indecision.” For those unfamiliar with it, what do you mean?
WPV: The 2019 Constitution was a hybrid in which many of our accumulated contradictions crystallized. It was an attempt to update the country’s “software.” The explicit reference to Marxism-Leninism as the official doctrine and communism as the ultimate goal was formally abandoned. The right to private property was recognized. Mixed economy was explicitly legalized. Cuba was defined as a “socialist State under the rule of law.” Demands for rights and guarantees from civil society were incorporated.
However, at the same time, centralized political control was maintained, the single-party system was preserved, and the party was still defined as the “superior guiding force of society and the State.” Many of the mechanisms that restrict political pluralization and binding deliberation were also left intact. In other words, elements of modern legal language were introduced without dismantling the institutional architecture of centralism. This created a hybrid constitutional order that was more complex on paper but did not result in equivalent changes to the actual distribution of power.
This results in constant tension: an economy reluctantly opening to the private sector, a pluralizing society, and an overflowing digital sphere, all under a political structure operating with the logic of the vanguard party of the 1960s, ’70s, and even the ’80s and 90s. This contradiction is difficult to sustain in the long term. You cannot have a diverse, digital (“connected”) transnational society governed by institutions designed for a homogeneous, disciplined, analog (“disconnected”) community. In this sense, I speak of “productive indefiniteness”: the constitution acknowledges unprecedented tensions and demands but, by failing to resolve them, shifts them toward political conflict and onto the streets.
ADD: Faced with this fractured landscape of exhausted or ineffective old narratives and disputed new ones, where are we headed? Do you see a new consensus emerging?
WPV: We are in a transitional period, and the uncertainty of our future direction is what intensifies the conflict. This is not a classic transition with clear replacement forces, but rather a cumulative crisis in which the certainties of the old order are collapsing, and a new horizon has yet to stabilize.
In a sense, Cuba has become an extreme laboratory for the hegemony crises affecting Latin America, including crises of representation, social unrest, the erosion of perceived emancipatory projects, the expansion of radicalized right-wing movements, and the search for democratic alternatives that avoid the pitfalls of both the deregulated market and the authoritarian or simply inefficient State. What is happening on the island is similar to processes taking place in Chile, Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela and Nicaragua. However, Cuba’s situation is unique because of its socialist revolution, which built strong legitimacy over decades based on pillars such as social justice, equality, independence, sovereignty, internationalism, and anti-imperialism
What is at stake is a future that avoids pure and simple neoliberal restoration, a system that has already demonstrated its capacity to produce massive exclusion, the privatization of life, and a devastating “every man for himself” mentality in Latin America. However, we must also avoid becoming trapped in the current authoritarian entrenchment that, in the name of independence and sovereignty, suffocates diversity and deteriorates the living conditions of the majority. The dilemma is no longer “savage capitalism or the status quo”; this dichotomy no longer reflects the experiences of many Cubans.
The challenge lies in moving toward a democratic and sovereign horizon where social justice and political freedom are not conflicting dimensions, but rather the foundation of any credible emancipatory project. The real dispute today is imagining a sovereign democracy in which equality does not come at the cost of freedom, and in which sovereignty is not a pretext for postponing the full exercise of inalienable and imprescriptible rights indefinitely.
Rather than a new consensus that has already been reached, what exists is a field of conflict and experimentation comprising community practices, sectoral activism, critical leftists, and artistic and media initiatives testing languages and organizational forms that do not quite fit into inherited categories. The outcome is still uncertain, which is why Cuba, with all its woes and troubles, remains an important yet challenging question mark for Latin American political imagination.
Featured image: Juan Francisco Elso (1956-1988), Caballo contra colibrí (Horse against Hummingbird), 1988. Wood, paper, twigs, jute, wax, volcanic sand, earth, and iron, 96 x 156 x 13 inches. Courtesy of El Museo del Barrio.
Translated from the Spanish original by Rolando Prats.
