14ymedio, Havana, 27 December 2023 — Hundreds of thousands of Cubans have been able to leave the country for the United States during 2023 thanks to humanitarian parole; another tens of thousands are Spain-bound thanks to the new Democratic Memory Law. As the country empties, the streets are left with citizens whose faces are increasingly poorer, increasingly older, increasingly hopeless.
If that face had to be given only one color, it would undoubtedly be dark. Because the most unfortunate people in Cuba have always been the same, before and after 1959 and until now, in the middle of the unstoppable stampede: the black population.
They are evident in any city in Cuba, in the lines at increasingly scarce grocery stores, sitting on sidewalks begging for money, rummaging through garbage containers. Long ago, many of them served the regime with enthusiasm, but today, the Revolution, inexorably failed, turns its back on them and leaves them to their fate, like stray dogs.
Others are neither black nor elderly, but, even so, they have not wanted or been able to leave Cuba. Ernesto, a resident of Central Havana in his 40s, has a difficult time because he has no one to ask for “sponsorship” from the United States or from Spanish ancestors to qualify for the “grandchildren law.” A once-successful musician, not only in the theater, but in tourist shows, he survives by doing different jobs, such as delivering food for private businesses. He lives in a precariously balanced building, but he has no mon