We call 1959 “the year of liberation.” Mine is the first generation that received the full benefits of the revolution. It’s the first generation that massively entered a public educational system. The first one that massively reached high school, the first one that massively reached university. The first one that’s massively vaccinated.

That led to the equilibrium in which regardless of where you were born, what neighborhood, what training, what professional activity, what wealth your family had, we all went into school and work with the same conditions. So I would say it’s the generation that most benefited from the revolution.

We came of age at the moment of greatest prosperity in Cuba – the end of the 1970s, beginning of the ’80s. We experienced a consistent increase in the standard of living and the equitable distribution of wealth in Cuba and the improvement of the social condition of the population as a whole.

Thousands were going to study in the Soviet Union and the other former socialist countries. It’s a moment in which you had the first PhDs and when our scientific capability exploded. It’s also the generation that massively participated in our internationalist operations in Africa, like our battle [against apartheid South Africa] in Angola.

They know a different reality. These are the children of the generation we were talking about, who did not have the fortune of experiencing the accomplishments of the Cuban Revolution as our generations did for two reasons: First, because Cuba was dealing with a severe economic situation. But second, because they were born when many achievements could be taken for granted, like having health care for all, access to education, racial barriers erased, and more.

They could take these achievements for granted, and yet they were facing the economic constraints of the Special Period when the Cuban economy dropped 36 percent in four years. Then after it began to recover, it never reached the possibilities of the 1980s, and now the younger ones are experiencing the very difficult conditions of the past five years.

In the past five years, Cuba has undergone a very difficult situation as a result of a combination of factors. One is that the government of Donald Trump, starting in 2019, began to put in place a policy that he called “maximum economic pressure” against Cuba. This is the strongest economy in the world trying to asphyxiate a small country and its economy.

This has had a severe impact in Cuba, especially because the efforts are not only directed against Cuba, but also economic partners that do business with Cuba, including financial institutions. All of that is a big tax on our economy.

Then you add to that the effects of COVID. We shut down the country totally, both from foreigners — which hit one of our main sources of income, which is tourism — but also we shut down factories and workplaces, and the economy hasn’t recovered from that yet.

Then you can add a third factor, which is the war in Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia and Belarus have all been traditionally important commercial partners of Cuba. Products like fertilizers, like cooking oil, like seeds and other products that we import from that part of the world have been stopped or become very difficult to obtain as a result of that war, and that has an impact on an economy.

People are facing long blackouts. Health services, which is one of Cuba’s great accomplishments, have been hit in a manner unfamiliar to our population. The capacity of the public health system to ensure the basic scheme of drugs and medicines required for the country is very big. So the limitations imply that many Cubans simply do not have access to basic drugs and medicines that they need, some of them for chronic diseases that need maintenance. We have problems with the availability of food. There’s an issue of inflation that is a huge distortion in the economy.

There’s a fourth factor. It began in 2011, when we took the political decision of transforming our economy. We called it updating the socialist economic model, but we began to take steps in 2016.

First, we had to deal with our currency, and there was a long-held conviction that we needed to correct the existence of double currencies and multiple exchange rates. [That currency unification] happened in the middle of COVID in January 2021. That has had an impact on our economy, and it’s difficult to manage it under the very severe constraints that we’re facing.

Among the measures taken by the Trump administration — and that the Biden administration continued — was keeping Cuba on the list of countries that allegedly sponsored terrorism. That impacts everything in Cuba economically: it impacts the availability of fuel, the amount of foreign exchange that the country’s capable of generating to deal with basic needs, and also the capacity to produce electricity.

Power consumption in the country has skyrocketed because people have more electrical equipment, appliances, electric bicycles, all that. So the demand has grown, and our power grid has aged, and we’ve had during this very difficult period limitations for maintenance, for repairs, for upgrading. The only way to balance that is through what we call distributed generation. That distributed generation depends on the import of diesel or fuel oil, which has become very expensive for us, above all because of US sanctions against the companies that transport oil to Cuba.

The difference between now and the 1990s is that in the ’90s the situation was more equitable. Today you see inflation and very high prices. You see restaurants that are beyond the salary of most, but they have customers. There are Cubans who go; you see the prices in the private stores that have been established, but there are people who buy, and many who cannot. There’s a hidden income — there’s a hidden paying capacity for some in the population through remittances or private business. They don’t depend on a salary like government officials or teachers or doctors.

This generates a level of inequality that hasn’t been experienced in Cuba since the 1960s. That’s a new reality that creates instability, creates this disenchantment in some, and generates migration.

US coercive measures have aimed at having the remittances flow to Cuba through irregular means. They don’t go through the banking system, which would allow us to have better management of the economy and a capacity to better distribute wealth and well-being in the country.

Cuba is like European countries in terms of social development. The advance in education, professional opportunities for women, and women’s rights in general have an impact in reduced fertility rates. Yet we have practically no immigration and a relatively high outward migration.

It puts it under stress. I wouldn’t say it leaves at a point of collapse, but it puts it under stress. But contrary to the past, we cannot say that a million people have truly migrated out of Cuba, at least not permanently. They continue to be and declare themselves residents in Cuba, but they’re not in the country. Some go and work part-time in the United States or some other countries and come back. But in real terms, that means we say we’re not [a country of] 11 million — we’re 10 million.

That is the case, with the important distinction that the US encourages Cuban migration. As you know, there’s a privileged treatment of Cubans that others don’t have.

In spite of our current difficulties, we still have at this moment over 24,000 Cuban health professionals working in fifty-six countries. You can add to that teachers, sports trainers, and other professionals. We receive no payment, no compensation for what we do in most instances. It’s pure solidarity. We do receive compensation in the case of economies that are larger or better off than the Cuban economy.

In addition to that, in Cuba we continue to train thousands of professionals from many countries, including the United States and including Palestinians. The students from Palestine, the students from Western Sahara pay nothing to study in Cuba. It’s an internationalist commitment that our population understands very well.

And of course, Cuba stands in solidarity with Palestine. Our president actually marched with our people in support of Palestine. I don’t know many presidents who have done that. Our position is clear and adamant, and we believe that Israel should stop the aggression, return to the borders of 1967, and allow for the refugees to come back to their homes. This includes the end of all the illegal settlements.

Anti-Cuban politicians in the United States fifteen or sixteen years ago began a campaign to discredit Cuban international cooperation, above all in the medical sector, where it was universally applauded.

We focused our medical internationalism efforts on countries that were greatest in need, and only decades after the triumph of the revolution did we receive some payment from nations that were wealthier than Cuba. Is this unusual? If any institution around the world were providing vital services, it would take an administrative overhead of, say, 30 percent to cover services. But when the Cuban government does it, it’s called “slavery.”

The doctors that participate in these programs are compensated. The Cuban doctors get both their full salary that they would get in Cuba plus an additional stipend in hard currency, which is sometimes multiples times their salary in Cuba. It is very difficult to say that someone who’s practicing abroad is a “slave” when they’re there voluntarily and receive an income much higher than they would receive if they were in Cuba. The people who push this narrative can’t find more than two dozen people to make these declarations, yet over a hundred thousand Cubans over the course of sixty years have participated in these programs.

When Trump came to power in 2017, there was pressure from the anti-Cuban sectors in the US for him to put Cuba on the State Department list of countries that allegedly sponsored terrorism. He resisted, to be truthful, until nine days before he left office.

It’s obviously a slander against Cuba, especially considering that Cuba has been a victim of terrorism organized in the United States. But beyond that, the importance is that once a country is placed in that list, as we’ve discussed, this automatically triggers a set of economic measures that have a chilling effect around the world because it threatens anyone who engages with Cuba.

The pretext used by the US government revolves around the Cuban role in the peace process in Colombia. Upon a request from the Colombian government, Cuba committed to host delegates from an insurgent group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the Colombian government delegates in Cuba.

Now, Cuba has been involved in the peace process of Colombia in the past, and we did so together with the government of Norway. Normally these commitments are quite complex because you have to first ensure your impartiality. Second, you must ensure the safety of all those participating. You cannot have any peace process if the participants didn’t believe this was the case.

The government of Iván Duque, as a result of a terrorist attack that occurred in Colombia, simply decided to put an end to the negotiations. We have no quarrel with that decision. It’s a sovereign decision. But the government then demanded that Cuba hand over this ELN delegation.

There was a protocol of what should happen if the talks broke down, and we said we must be true to the protocols we signed. Cuba would not be trusted again with any peace process anywhere in the world if we were to hand over these people. We received the full support of the government of Norway, which was our partner in this process. Yet this was the excuse used by the government of Donald Trump to put Cuba in the list.

The paradox is that once a new government came into power in Colombia, new peace talks were carried out in Cuba. It was in Cuba where two fundamental agreements [between the Colombian government and rebel groups] were forged. None of this would’ve been possible if Cuba at that time would have bent over and said, “Sure, we’ll not respect our commitments.”

Most of the people we talk to in the United States were surprised. I would say that most of the governments of Latin America were surprised too. During the 2020 campaign itself, Biden said that he would change the policy of the Trump administration.

So the fact that he has been so faithful to the policy of maximum economic pressure shows to us that there was never an inclination from the president and his inner circle to change Trump’s policy. Rather, the option was to take advantage of the fact that Trump had put these policies in place and simply wait and see and continue, see them run their course and see if they’re capable of achieving a total collapse of the Cuban economy if they were able to achieve a high level of social unrest in Cuba — regardless of the cost to common people, to millions of Cuban families.

We are ready to engage, no matter who is in power. But we are going to continue in our determination to have our own political and economic system and to reject foreign interference from the United States or from any country.