An audio recording reveals Miriam Nicado García’s pressure to get students to abandon their protest against Etecsa’s rate hike.
14ymedio, Yunior García Aguilera, Madrid, 17 June 2025 — The recently leaked audio recording of a meeting between the rector of the University of Havana, Miriam Nicado García, and students dissatisfied with the so-called ‘Tarifazo’ — the rate hike from Etecsa, the State telecommunications monopoly– not only confirms youth discontent with an arbitrary measure, but also gives voice—and tone—to the authoritarian model of top-down pedagogy masked by the rhetoric of “unity and dialogue.”
Nicado is not a mere academic administrator. She is a deputy in the National Assembly of People’s Power, a member of the Council of State, a member of the Communist Party, and the former rector of the University of Informatics Sciences (UCI), an emblematic center of technological control and loyalty to power. In other words, she is an official of the regime, located in one of the country’s key institutions: the University of Havana, the historic cradle of Cuban critical thought.
It begins with economic technicalities, continues with condescension and ends with veiled threats.
The audio, which has gone viral on social media, shows a debate that begins with economic technicalities, continues with condescension, and ends with veiled threats. A story that many students, especially the bravest ones, know by heart. “If you don’t come to class, you don’t receive classes,” Nicado says in a calm but implacable voice. “If it’s a strike, then it’s counterrevolution.”
Thus, bluntly, the university’s highest authority equates a student civic action with “treason.” The students’ demand was clear: that the Etecsa rate hike be explained transparently, that space be given to criticism and real dialogue, not institutional monologue. The response: emotional blackmail, ideological disqualification, and the insinuation of punishment.
“Do not come to c
