The café is spacious and softly buzzing, with quiet conversations carrying over from distant tables. Reflections flicker in the massive mirrors lining the partitions of the Lavapiés café the place we meet.
Seated close to the doorway is activist and playwright Yúnior García, who speaks about recollections and longings tied to his native Cuba. “I’m a chronic Cuban,” he says. “I can’t get it out of my head that I’m Cuban and that my home is there. My dreams, for the most part, are there.”
García left the island greater than 4 years in the past, in November 2021, after going through harassment from the Cuban authorities and its supporters for organizing protests demanding larger political freedoms. Madrid grew to become his refuge.
“I’ve spent all this time without seeing my mother, without seeing my son,” he tells NCS. “I left my son when he was about a meter and a half tall – my little boy. Now he’s nearly 6 feet 1. My father died in Cuba and I couldn’t even say goodbye.”
The distance is painful, however García has not deserted hope of returning – particularly now, as he sees what he considers a glimmer of risk rising from renewed pressure by Washington on Havana.
That pressure was lately articulated by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who informed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “I think we would like to see the regime there change.” He added, nevertheless, “That doesn’t mean we’re going to provoke a change.”
“We can criticize many things about (US President Donald Trump’s) administration,” García says, “but on Venezuela and Cuba, it’s doing what Venezuelans and Cubans have been shouting for years.”
Still, García warns, Trump faces a fragile balancing act. “He’ll have to apply enough pressure to generate change within the Cuban system, without triggering chaos,” he says – chaos that would lead, for example, to “a massive migration crisis.”
For García, timing is crucial. “If the change we dream of doesn’t happen,” he says, “Cuba could be condemned to becoming a failed state – and possibly an irreversible one.”
Just a number of streets away, the air fills with the odor of garlic, cumin and cilantro. It’s almost 2 p.m. – lunchtime in Madrid – and the aromas drifting from Havana Blues, a Cuban restaurant in the Arganzuela district, do their work.
The supply is chef Daimé Hernando, who runs the kitchen her father opened in 2012 with one aim: to make clients really feel “like they’re eating their grandmother’s cooking.”
Squid, moros y cristianos (rice and beans), and meat dishes crowd the stoves. Photos of iconic Cuban landmarks cowl the partitions. For Hernando, these sights and smells as soon as belonged to on a regular basis life.
The first few years after leaving her native Guantánamo, in southeastern Cuba, “there was an overwhelming sense of longing. Every vacation you want to go back, see your friends, your family.” Eventually, she provides, “you go through a painful grieving process – accepting that maybe you’ll never return.”
Her final journey to Cuba was in 2019. “That’s when I told myself: I’m not going back.”
But one thing has shifted in current weeks.
“Lately, I’ve started to feel a little hope,” she says. “Hope that things might change, that the situation could improve, that I might return and show my daughter where I was born, where I grew up, our family home.”
Like García, Hernando factors to elevated US pressure – notably following a US navy operation in Caracas aimed toward capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro – because the supply of her cautious optimism.
She is aware of change received’t come simply. But if it does, she says, it should translate into concrete enhancements for unusual Cubans: “Better healthcare, safer streets, real prosperity, access to basic goods – and wages that actually cover people’s basic needs.”
Three kilometers (1.8 miles) away, Massiel Rubio is inside her semi-basement condominium, enhancing manuscripts for publishing homes. Originally from Jaruco, about 25 miles east of Havana, she left Cuba almost 9 years in the past.
“Living in Cuba had become unsustainable,” she says. Rubio remembers going through skilled obstacles after working for a publishing home that printed authors banned on the island – a historical past that, she says, adopted her and restricted job alternatives.
Her nostalgia is muted. “I miss an island that maybe doesn’t exist anymore,” she says. “I miss something that’s gone – something I wish could exist again.”
Like the others, she carefully follows occasions in Cuba, typically via mates and colleagues who stay there. But her outlook is extra cautious. “After so many years involved in activist groups, in efforts to create change, I feel exhausted,” she admits.
Still, she acknowledges that one thing could also be stirring. “We can’t talk about positive change yet – we don’t know what will happen. But at least there’s the possibility that something moves.”
If change does come, Rubio insists, it should embody civil society. “There has to be representation from those who will actually live with the consequences of that change – and from those who have been working toward it for years.”
Only then, she says, will Cuba’s future really profit the individuals who stay on the island.