In 1974, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights documented Teodoro González Alvarado at Guanajay Prison in Havana, where political prisoners were suffering ill-treatment and denial of medical care while the Cuban government remained silent. Teodoro had been taken as a teenager. He would spend 26 years as a political prisoner. His brother was executed before his eyes. He is alive today in Miami, more than half a century later, still waiting for accountability.
That history is not a footnote to Cuba's new economic language. It is the evidence the regime wants investors to overlook.
Now the same state wants to be read as a balance sheet instead of a record of abuse. It wants foreign governments and investors to talk about private banks, foreign capital, and market openings as though the problem were only economic mismanagement, rather than a system of power that has never answered for what it did.
Before calling this reform, the world should ask what Cuba has actually changed. Cubans are still shouting libertad. More than 1,200 political prisoners remain behind bars. The regime has not surrendered power. It has renamed impunity.
Cuba is not merely a one-party state. It is a police state, a prison state, and a military economy. Key sectors are dominated by GAESA, a conglomerate controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces and answerable to no independent public authority. In 2024, Cuba's own Comptroller General admitted she had never been permitted access to GAESA's accounts. She was dismissed shortly afterward.
This is not the first time the regime has performed reform for an international audience. It has spent decades perfecting a curated image: hospitals presented as proof of revolutionary compassion while infant deaths are reportedly reclassified to protect official mortality rates; doctors exported as symbols of solidarity while the state keeps most of their wages, confiscates their passports, and deems those who refuse to return as deserters. Cuba sells the world the photograph and hides the machinery that produced it.
Without independent courts, property rights remain conditional on loyalty. Without a free press, corruption stays hidden. Without civil society, human rights are unenforceable. The state has spent generations destroying the public's belief that justice is possible at all. Economic reform cannot be judged as a technical policy shift. It must be judged as a question of power, and the power has not moved.
The continuity that matters most is not in Cuba's economic policy. It is in its prisons.
Today, half a century after my great-uncle sat in Guanajay, another teenager can tell the same story. Jonathan David Muir Burgos was 16 when he was arrested for joining protests in Morón demanding electricity and food. The charge was "sabotage," the same elastic word the regime has long used to turn protest into prosecution, hunger into criminality, and children into enemies of the state.
The method was chillingly familiar. Denial of medical care. Isolation from family. A political charge dressed as criminal law. He suffered severe infections, intestinal parasites, and vasovagal crises. He received one meal a day in a disposable cup. State Security reportedly incited other prisoners to assault him. He spent his 17th birthday behind those walls.
He was released after 100 days in detention, following sustained international pressure — but his release answers for none of it. He should never have been imprisoned. His case reached the Inter-American Commission, which issued Resolution 30/2026 finding his life at irreparable risk. Cuba ignored it, just as it ignored my great-uncle's case half a century earlier. The regime did not correct an injustice. It relieved a pressure. And more than 1,200 political prisoners remain behind bars.
This is how the Cuban state survives: it changes the vocabulary of the economy while preserving the grammar of repression.
My great-uncle survived 26 years in prison. His brother did not. Their story runs in an unbroken line from Guanajay in 1974 to Canaleta in 2026: the same cruelty, the same silence, the same punishment for anyone who refuses to be quiet.
No economic reform can answer for that. No investment deal can bury it. No new vocabulary can turn a prison state into a country at peace with its people.
The world should not ask only whether Cuba is opening its economy. It should ask for whom, and at what price, while children are still imprisoned for demanding food, electricity, and freedom.
Until Cuba relinquishes power, allows free elections, frees its political prisoners, and answers for the lives it destroyed, reform is not reform.
It is impunity with a new name.
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