Cuba’s emergency truly subsided only after Hugo Chávez was elected President of Venezuela, in 1998. Chávez and Castro signed a pact in which Venezuela agreed to provide Cuba with oil, in exchange for thousands of Cuban doctors, teachers, sports instructors, and security agents. Chávez once described Castro to me as “a beacon”—a father figure who had convinced him that socialism was the way forward for humanity. The alliance grew so close that people joked that Venezuela and Cuba had merged into a new revolutionary entity, “Cubazuela.” After Maduro succeeded Chávez, who died, from cancer, in 2013, a downturn in global oil prices devastated Venezuela’s economy. Maduro continued sending oil, but far less of it—by 2025, about a third of what Cuba imported, with Mexico supplying much of the rest. Since Maduro’s capture, in January, Cuba has been on its own again. This time, there is no charismatic leader to pacify the angry citizens.
On January 27th, Díaz-Canel joined several thousand student loyalists, soldiers, and senior leaders at La Escalinata, a grand stone staircase that leads to the entrance of the University of Havana. They were there for the March of the Torches, an annual tribute to José Martí, Cuba’s ultimate nationalist hero. Martí, a journalist and a poet, was an essential figure in the nineteenth-century war of independence, in which Cuban élites revolted against the Spanish colonists. As the fighting stretched on for decades, Martí helped rally his peers. “How beautiful it is to die when one dies fighting in defense of the fatherland,” he once wrote. In 1895, he took part in a cavalry charge on the Spaniards and was killed on his first day in battle.
Spain was finally forced out in 1898, when the United States took the side of the Cubans—only to deny them sovereignty, by making Cuba a de-facto U.S. protectorate and then by intervening repeatedly to prop up friendly autocrats. But the legend of Martí endured; he became Cuba’s “Apostle,” and a bust of his image had a prominent place in schoolyards across the island. Cuban politicians are still careful to present themselves as devotees of Martí, and sacrificing for la patria is a consecrated ideal. In 1953, six months before Fidel Castro launched his insurrection against the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, he led a torchlight procession in Havana, to commemorate the centenary of Martí’s birth. It has been replicated ever since.
This year’s march—dubbed the Anti-Imperialist Centenary March of the Torches, because 2026 is the hundredth anniversary of Castro’s birth—had an air of defiance. Flags billowed. A young crooner sang a patriotic ballad, and the crowd swayed along. Litza Elena González Desdín, the head of the government-aligned student federation, gave an impassioned speech from the top of the stairs, rallying whatever remained of the Revolution’s true believers. “Compatriots, we are living through very turbulent times, in which the empire and its emperor, Donald Trump, want to impose an order of bombs, kidnappings, persecution, destruction, and death, and intend to drag us back to destructive fascism,” she said. She denounced “the cowardly military aggression of the United States against Venezuela” and “the kidnapping of the President of that sister nation.” She reminded the marchers that their country had also paid a blood sacrifice: dozens of Cuban bodyguards, secretly assigned to protect Maduro, had been killed. “We will never forget that on January 3rd, in the darkest hours of the early morning, Cubans physically lost thirty-two of our bravest sons,” she said.