Communist figurehead “president” of Cuba Miguel Díaz-Canel published a message to welcome the new year this week in which he demanded the Cuban people be “united more than ever” behind the communists, who marked 67 years in power on Thursday.
Díaz-Canel noted that 2026 will also bring the 100th anniversary of the birth of longtime dictator Fidel Castro, who seized power in a coup d’etat on January 1, 1959, and moved rapidly to use firing squads, labor camps, and other atrocities to subjugate the population. In addition to eliminating every basic civil liberty, the Castro regime dramatically impoverished what was once the wealthiest country in Latin America prior to the arrival of communism, leaving it in a destitute state that, in 2026, means the average Cuban struggles to procure food, clean water, electricity, and other basic needs.
The extreme shortages of nearly every core good, widespread use of violence against dissidents, and an outbreak of mosquito-borne illness in the past two months have exacerbated what has been an incessant wave of civil unrest since the national anti-communist protests of July 2021. Human rights monitors reported that several months in 2025 broke records in the number of documented protests on the island, most recently November, the last month for which data is available at press time. While most international media stopped covering the anti-communist protests following the uprising in 2021, protests have nonetheless persisted with backing from local Catholic leaders and the support of the Cuban diaspora.
In his message on Wednesday, Díaz-Canel, who serves as a puppet to dictator Raúl Castro, proclaimed the year 2025 a victory for communism.
“May every task that we take on in 2026, from the most complex economic transformations to the simplest gesture of solidarity, be pregnant with Fidel’s spirit of struggle, his profound love for the people, and his unwavering commitment to social justice,” Díaz-Canel wrote, according to the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba, Granma.
“May 2026, the year of the centenary of Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, find us fighting and more united than ever!” he concluded. “Long live the revolution! Long live Fidel and Raúl! Socialism or death!”
Díaz-Canel also published a propaganda video on his social media pages exploiting the likeness of Cuban founding father José Martí, whose birthday on January 28 is celebrated by Cubans around the world. There is no evidence Martí, who died in battle fighting the Spanish for independence in 1895, had any Marxist tendencies or would have in any way approved of the communist Castro dictatorship.
The call for a “united” Cuba in support of communism follows both a near-total population collapse – the product of Cubans fleeing the country by the tens of thousands – and a particularly active period of anti-communist activity. According to the Cuban Observatory of Conflict (OCC), which monitors protest activity, Cubans participated in 1,326 protests and “civic actions” in November 2025, a record-high according to the organization. November was the fifth consecutive month in which the OCC documented a record high number of protests.
The organization documented various reasons for the increased dissident activity, including a massive public health crisis caused by the collapse of Cuba’s dysfunctional communist healthcare system. While it became a popular talking point for many Western leftists in the early 20th century to claim, falsely, that Cuba maintained state-of-the-art health care, Cubans have in reality lacked any access to competent health care for decades. Having lost financial support from allies such as the defunct Soviet Union and, much more recently, fellow impoverished socialist Venezuela, health care for regular Cubans is barely existent. A study published last week found, for example, that during the current period of outbreak of dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, all mosquito-borne diseases, at least 8,700 Cubans have died needlessly due to lack of adequate care. The study, published by the Cuba Siglo 21 think tank, noted that the Cuban government’s official tally of these deaths stood at 47.
The spread of these diseases is exacerbated by the increasing shortages of electricity, clean water, and other basic needs. As Diario de Cuba noted in response to Díaz-Canel’s message for the new year, the “president” himself admitted to the extraordinary collapse of the country less than two weeks before his triumphant 2026 message. “This is not about just another crisis: this is the accumulation of distortions, adversities, difficulties, and proper errors,” he admitted in a speech before the rubber-stamp “National People’s Power Assembly.”
Among the biggest protests to take place recently was the outbreak in Havana in early December of calls for an end to communism following a 15-hour period of electric blackout. Cubans took to the streets of Havana, previously untouched by the shortages common in the more remote provinces, shouting, “Down with communism!” and engaging in scuffles with the police.
In Marianao, a local priest rang the bells of his church to express solidarity with the protesters.
That priest, later identified as Mexican national Father José Ramírez, was rapidly expelled from the country for his display of compassion for the Cuban people.
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