For my loved ones, for my compatriots, for my Cuba. For what lies ahead.
On the threshold of a new year, I don’t ask for too much: just a bit of certainty. Not as a slogan or a promise, but as a minimum condition for living a meaningful life. Because if something has been wearing down over the years, it’s not only the economy or material expectations, but that intimate trust — silent but decisive — that the country and its people will be better off tomorrow than today.
Certainty is not a philosophical abstraction or a privilege. It is a concrete tool of daily life. It is the foundation from which one can plan, resist, create and even dissent. When that certainty crumbles, not only doubt appears: weariness, disaffection and the temptation to withdraw emerge. Life begins to be lived in a transitory way, as if everything were provisional, as if nothing ever truly took root.
Hence, the question becomes inevitable: how long has it been since we’ve had a measure of certainty? How long has living in Cuba been more about managing uncertainty than building a future? It’s not about absolute guarantees or idyllic futures, but about something more elemental: the possibility of imagining tomorrow without the constant feeling of fragility. The lack of certainty is not only economic; it is also existential. It infiltrates family conversations, the decisions that are postponed, the silences that linger. It is a form of subjective weariness that is rarely reflected in statistics.
Exactly twenty years ago, in the midst of the readjustment after the Special Period crisis, Fernando Martínez Heredia warned about this critical point. In his essay “Nación y sociedad en Cuba” (Nation and Society in Cuba), included in En el horno de los 90, he pointed out that it would be ineffective to confront the cultural war of contemporary capitalism solely from the convictions and experiences of a past of struggles, achievements and already formed identities. That world, he argued, contained essential values for facing the challenges of the present, but it also showed signs of exhaustion and moral weaknesses that made it vulnerable. The hegemonic culture was not advancing as a restoration of a defeated past, but as a promise of progress, as a necessary adaptation, as an inevitable future.
Toward the end of that text, Martínez Heredia formulated an even more demanding warning: a stage of cultural struggle was opening up before Cubans in which resistance alone would not be enough. It would be necessary to be creative to move forward without losing the nation or the more just and humane way of life that had been achieved. And he added a central idea, almost forgotten today: the urgency of a renewal of the revolutionary project that would integrate the harshness of current realities with objectives more ambitious than those of 1959.
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Two decades later, when no one can deny the erosion of the myth, this reflection retains a disturbing relevance. Not only because the global context has become more aggressive, but because the absence of internal certainty weakens society’s capacity to produce meaning, imagine alternatives and sustain connections. Without renewal, memory risks becoming mere ritual; without a horizon, identity tends toward withdrawal.
On the other hand, certainty is neither obedience nor blind faith. It is coherence. It is the trust that is built when there is correspondence between discourse and lived experience. It is the point at which ideas cease to be abstract statements and become social practice. When this coherence breaks down, what is eroded is not only institutional credibility, but also people’s emotional relationship with the common project.
That is why certainty cannot be decreed or imposed. It does not arise from repeated slogans or self-sufficient narratives. It is built in concrete life: in sustained policies, in the real possibility of participating, of being heard, of not feeling treated as collateral damage. In sociocultural terms, it is built when the nation once again becomes a space of shared meaning and not merely a symbolic framework.
Talking about the future, then, requires more than promises. It demands political imagination, public ethics and a genuine willingness to review what has been inherited. No emancipatory project can be sustained indefinitely solely on the epic of its origins. When the revolution ceases to question itself, it also ceases to revolutionize.
Perhaps the certainty that Professor Martínez Heredia alluded to is nothing more than the possibility of rethinking the country from a place of creativity, not understood as a fragile slogan attached to the idea of resistance, but as a conscious practice aimed at producing meaning, horizon and project. A creativity that does not renounce social justice or dignity, but that assumes, without paralyzing nostalgia, that every form of just life needs to be reviewed and renewed in order not to become exhausted.
For Cuba, today, certainty would be something both modest and profound: the feeling that staying is not a naive gesture, that imagining the future is not an empty exercise, that daily life does not unfold in the open air…and without light.
