The cafe is spacious and you can hear quiet conversations from far away tables. Reflections flicker in the large mirrors lining the walls of Lavapiès, the cafe where we met.
Seated near the entrance was activist and playwright Yunior García, who spoke about his memories and longings for his native Cuba. “I’m a chronic Cuban,” he says. “I can’t get it out of my head that I’m Cuban and that I have a home there. Most of the time, my dreams are there.”
Garcia left the island more than four years ago in November 2021 after facing harassment from the Cuban government and its supporters for organizing protests calling for greater political freedoms. Madrid became his refuge.
“I’ve spent all this time without seeing my mother or my son,” he told CNN. “I left my son when he was about 5 feet and a half tall, my little boy. Now he’s almost 6 feet 1 inch tall. He died in Cuba, and I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”
Although the distance is painful, Garcia remains hopeful of a return — especially now that he sees a glimmer of hope in the face of renewed pressure from Washington on Havana.
This pressure was recently articulated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “We would like to see the government change there.” But, he added, “that doesn’t mean we’re going to cause change.”
“There are a lot of things you can criticize about (President Donald Trump’s) administration,” Garcia said. “But when it comes to Venezuela and Cuba, we are doing what Venezuelans and Cubans have been crying out for years.”
Still, Garcia cautions that President Trump will have to strike a delicate balance. “We need to apply enough pressure to create change within the Cuban system without causing chaos,” he says — chaos that could lead, for example, to a “massive migration crisis.”
For Garcia, timing is important. “If the changes we dream of do not occur, Cuba may be declared a failed and perhaps irredeemable state,” he says.
Just a few streets away, the air is filled with the scent of garlic, cumin, and coriander. It’s nearly 2 p.m., lunchtime in Madrid, and the aromas waft from Havana Blues, a Cuban restaurant in the Arganzuela district.
Source: Chef Daime Hernando, who runs the kitchen, which her father opened in 2012, aims to give customers “the feeling of eating your grandmother’s cooking.”
Squid, morroz y cristiano (rice and beans), and meat dishes are on the stove. Photographs of Cuba’s iconic landmarks cover the walls. For Hernando, these sights and smells were once part of everyday life.
In the first few years after leaving her hometown of Guantanamo in southeastern Cuba, she added, “there was an overwhelming feeling of longing. Every vacation, I wanted to go back and see my friends and family.” Eventually, she added, “you go through a painful grieving process, accepting that you may never be able to return.”
She last visited Cuba in 2019. “That’s when I said to myself, ‘I’m not going back.'”
But something has changed in recent weeks.
“Recently, I’ve started to feel a little bit more hopeful,” she says. “I hope things change, things get better, and I can go back and show my daughter where I was born, where I grew up, and my family home.”
Like García, Hernando cites increased U.S. pressure, particularly after the U.S. military operation in Caracas aimed at capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, as a source of cautious optimism.
She knows that change doesn’t come easily. But if it happens, she says, it should lead to tangible improvements for ordinary Cubans. “Better health care, safer streets, real prosperity, access to essential goods, and wages that actually cover people’s basic needs.”
Three kilometers away, Massiel Rubio is editing a manuscript for a publisher in his semi-basement apartment. Originally from Jarco, about 40 miles east of Havana, she left Cuba nearly nine years ago.
“Life in Cuba has become unsustainable,” she says. Rubio recalls facing professional obstacles after working for a publishing company that banned authors from publishing on the island. She says that history stuck with her and limited her job opportunities.
Her nostalgia is suppressed. “I miss an island that may no longer exist,” she says. “I miss things that are gone. Things that I wish existed once again.”
Like others, she closely follows events in Cuba through friends and colleagues who remain there. But her outlook is more cautious. “After years of being involved with activist groups and trying to create change, I feel exhausted,” she admits.
Still, she admits that something may be upsetting. “I can’t talk about positive changes yet. We don’t know what will happen. But at least something could be moving.”
Rubio argues that if change is to come, it must include civil society. “There has to be representation from people who are actually living with the consequences of that change and who have been working towards that change for years.”
Only then, she says, will Cuba’s future truly benefit those who remain on the island.
