Every time in Cuba (or anywhere) the word “town”, something more than a definition is activated. It is not a neutral term nor a simple demographic reference. It is a word loaded with history, promises, epic and also wear and tear. Say “town” It is entering a sensitive area where politics, daily life and collective emotions intersect.
The people are usually presented as the great subject of history, a protagonist of change, repository of social justice, moral guarantor of any sociopolitical project. This notion plays a decisive role, especially in countries marked by deep inequalities and an explicit desire for transformation. The people are the majority, future and legitimacy.
Talking about the Cuban people implies assuming that there is no single experience or homogeneous voice. Society is crossed by visible fractures: economic, generational, territorial. Today’s Cuba is not lived the same in Havana as in the east of the country; Those who receive remittances do not think the same as those who do not; Those who plan to leave and those who know they will stay do not imagine the future in the same way. It is the same people and at the same time different, those Cubans who live in Cuba and the millions of compatriots spread across other latitudes.
From a sociological perspective, the town is not an essence, but a relationship. It is built in the material conditions of existence, in shared practices, in the ways of facing scarcity. In Cuba, this translates into a daily life organized around informal networks, exchanged favors, and practical knowledge. The people are in line to obtain daily subsistence, in the blackouts, in the neighbor who gives you a cup of coffee, in the improvised barter that allows you to resolve the urgent.
That dimension rarely appears in solemn speeches. However, that is where life is sustained. Far from rhetoric, the people exist in the daily management of uncertainty, where there is an accumulation of strategies to follow.
At the political level, the people continue to be a central and disputed word. He is invoked to justify decisions, ask for sacrifices and loyalty. But this invocation coexists with a growing distance between the story and concrete experience. The people of the discourse do not always coincide with the real people: those who get tired, those who doubt, those who do not find clear answers to their immediate problems.
There is also fatigue. In the bodies that age working without guarantees, in the women who support entire homes, in the young people who look abroad as a possible horizon. This deeply political dimension is usually left out of official accounts. However, it decisively crosses the Cuban present.
Culture offers more eloquent clues. Popular humor, music and everyday language function as social thermometers. Irony, double meaning, shared mockery, are ways of saying what cannot always be said directly. There is no romanticism there: there is symbolic elaboration of the crisis. Laughing at the problem doesn’t solve it, but it allows you to endure it.
That’s when an uncomfortable but inevitable question appears: who speaks today on behalf of the Cuban people? From what places is it defined, represented and interpreted? The answers are not simple. There are sincere adhesions, silent criticisms, disappointments that do not become a breakup, loyalties that coexist with discomfort. The people do not express themselves in a single way or at the same volume.
Talking about the people today requires abandoning comfortable simplifications. It is not a uniform mass nor a subject always aware of itself. It is a multiplicity of lives that coexist, contradict and adapt. It is memory and present, belonging and desire to escape, resistance and exhaustion.
Perhaps the challenge is to return the people to their real density: to remove them from the slogan and recognize them not as a closed word, but as a moving process. Because in Cuba, continuing to live—with dignity, humor and open questions—continues to be a form of political action.
And the people, far from exhausting themselves in a slogan, reinvent themselves every day in the stubborn practice of existing.
