If José Martí Had Lived Under Castro

Opinion | Cuba’s regime proudly recalls how Spain jailed a teenager for writing a letter. It leaves out how many teenagers it has jailed for shouting “freedom.”

On October 21, 2026, Sierra Maestra, the Communist Party’s official newspaper in Santiago de Cuba, posted an anniversary tribute on X with one of the most painful photographs in Cuban history: José Martí in a prisoner’s uniform, a chain fastened around his waist. Its text recalled that on that date in 1869, the teenage Martí was imprisoned in Havana on a charge of infidencia—disloyalty to the Spanish Crown.

They display it like a medal. They seem not to notice they are holding up a mirror.

What José Martí did to land in prison

José Julián Martí Pérez was 16. He had not fired a shot or burned down a barracks. On October 4, 1869, members of the Spanish Volunteer Corps passed the home of his friend Fermín Valdés Domínguez on Industria Street and thought they heard mocking remarks. They searched the house and found a letter signed by Martí and Fermín. Addressed to a schoolmate, Carlos de Castro y de Castro, it condemned his decision to enlist in the Spanish army and called him an apostate.

That letter led Martí into Havana’s National Prison on October 21. A court-martial sentenced him on March 4, 1870, to six years in prison with forced labor. At 17, he broke stone in the San Lázaro quarries with a shackle around his ankle. Confinement on the Isle of Pines followed, then exile to Spain in January 1871, where he wrote Political Imprisonment in Cuba.

He dedicated the prison photograph to his mother with verses that can be translated as: “Look at me, Mother, and for love of me do not weep: / if, a slave to my age and my beliefs, / I filled your martyred heart with thorns, / remember that flowers bloom among thorns.”

That was the crime: an opinion written on paper. Today, we would call it a post.

The young Martís of July 11

On July 11, 2021, thousands of Cubans took to the streets shouting “freedom” and “we are hungry.” Among them were teenagers the same age Martí had been when he was arrested. Cuba’s own attorney general’s office acknowledged that 55 of the 790 people prosecuted were between 16 and 17. Sentences for those convicted of sedition ranged from five to 25 years.

Give them names. Rowland Jesús Castillo Castro was 17 when he protested in Toyo, in Havana’s Diez de Octubre municipality. He was a wrestler with national medals and no criminal record. Prosecutors sought 23 years; the court imposed 18. He turned 18 behind bars. His mother, Yudinela Castro, was held for about two weeks on an alleged contempt charge and then released to remain under investigation at home. His father, Ángel Rolando Castillo, received a two-year prison sentence in a summary trial after demanding his son’s freedom. Spain, at least, did not imprison Mariano Martí for grieving over his son.

According to activists cited by the independent press, two others from that Toyo group, Kendry Miranda Cárdenas and Brandon David Becerra Curbelo, received sentences of 19 and 13 years, respectively. Brandon was arrested at 17.

At the end of June 2026, Prisoners Defenders counted 820 political prisoners in Cuba, including 40 people imprisoned while still minors.

Spain sentenced one teenager for a letter. The Castro dictatorship sentenced dozens for a shout.

Anna Bensi: Alamar’s Martí

Anna Sofía Benítez Silvente is 21 and lives in Alamar. She began posting political videos from her bedroom, using scripts she wrote herself, after encountering obstacles to obtaining her dental prosthetics technician diploma. She says aloud what so many Cubans say privately: the island is a dictatorship.

State Security did not answer with arguments. It presented her with a menu. According to her account, reported by Havana Times, she was given three options: stop speaking, go into exile or spend her youth in prison.

On October 1, 2026, a municipal court in Habana del Este convicted her and her mother, Caridad Silvente, over a video showing an Interior Ministry agent delivering a summons at their home. Each received two years of restriction of liberty, a noncustodial sentence that, according to their lawyer, can include a ban on leaving Cuba. Earlier, she had reported losing control of her WhatsApp and Telegram accounts after they were hacked.

Prison, exile or surrender. It is the same menu Spain offered Martí. The difference is that Martí, at least, was eventually allowed to leave.

A country where young people see two exits

Those who have lived there know what it means to be 18 in Cuba: a diploma that cannot put food on the table, a salary that runs out before the month does, blackouts that swallow the day and night. For too many young people, the future seems to narrow to two doors. One is jineterismo—selling intimacy to a foreigner to help a family survive. The other is the airport, the jungle or the sea.

The demographic collapse needs no embellishment. According to Cuba’s National Office of Statistics and Information, the country lost 245,264 residents to migration in 2025, and its official population fell to 9,434,593. A Council on Foreign Relations study estimated that between 1.6 million and 2.75 million Cubans had left since 2020. Young people are central to that exodus.

Martí wrote that the homeland is “an altar, not a pedestal.” The regime has turned it into a departure lounge.

What would happen to José Martí’s newspaper?

José Martí was not only a prisoner. He was a journalist. Before turning 16, he had contributed to El Diablo Cojuelo and published his own paper, La Patria Libre, which carried his dramatic poem Abdala. He could do so in Havana because the colonial authorities briefly permitted freedom of the press in January 1869. It did not last, but it existed. Under Castro’s system, independent journalism has had no such protected space.

He founded his great newspaper, Patria, on March 14, 1892. In New York, in exile.

That detail should embarrass the official propagandists. Today, the regime accuses independent outlets of serving the CIA, USAID or another convenient acronym. The fact that their directors live abroad becomes part of its indictment. Follow that logic and Martí, too, becomes a mercenary financed from New York.

The government’s online defenders keep asking: if you care so much about Cuba, why not go back and say it there? The answer is in its prisons. Those who try can find themselves facing criminal charges.

Mayelín Rodríguez Prado was 21 when she livestreamed the Nuevitas protests on Facebook in August 2022. A Camagüey court sentenced her to 15 years for sedition and “continuous enemy propaganda.” Yoan de la Cruz livestreamed the July 11 protest in San Antonio de los Baños. Prosecutors sought eight years for public disorder and contempt; he initially received six. In May 2022, after roughly 10 months behind bars, an appeal reduced his sentence to five years without imprisonment.

In Yaguajay, José Julián has spent close to a year in custody. According to people close to him, he faces charges of public disorder, contempt and acts against the constitutional order, with prosecutors seeking eight years. His October 15 trial took place behind closed doors, with State Security agents filling the courtroom and without his being allowed to testify, according to accounts reported by Cubanos por el Mundo.

Could Martí have founded Patria in Havana today? Even accredited foreign correspondents depend on credentials issued by the Foreign Ministry’s International Press Center. Authorities withdrew those credentials from El País correspondent Mauricio Vicent in 2011 after 20 years of reporting, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. On November 13, 2021, two days before a planned civic march, they revoked the credentials of five EFE journalists—a measure the agency called an unprecedented attack.

The warning to every correspondent was clear: watch every word if you want to stay. In our view, that pressure has pushed parts of the foreign press away from scrutinizing power and toward accommodating its narrative.

Cubanos por el Mundo has its own dispute with The Associated Press. It filed a formal complaint over what it considers selective censorship involving an agency employee who labeled reports published here false. In 2020, this outlet also reported independent journalist Julio Batista Rodríguez’s criticism that an AP story on the San Isidro Movement read as though it had been written at Granma.

Martí published Patria from New York because colonial Cuba would not let him publish it at home. Those of us reporting from Miami recognize the predicament. If exile makes us mercenaries, the Apostle of Cuban independence would head the list.

Today, a newspaper carrying that independent spirit inside Cuba is La Hora de Cuba. Its director, Henry Constantín, a Camagüey journalist and regional vice chair for Cuba of the Inter American Press Association’s press freedom committee, was arrested on September 16 on an alleged disobedience charge. Authorities say he failed to appear for a September 9 summons; he says he went and the officers had already left. He was taken to Villa María Luisa, State Security’s interrogation headquarters in Camagüey, then to the maximum-security Kilo 7 prison in pretrial detention. Reporters Without Borders counted it as his 19th documented detention.

A travel ban in place since 2019 prevented him from going to Stockholm in May to accept the Civil Rights Defender of the Year award given to La Hora de Cuba. In mid-October, prison officials said they found a homemade knife among his belongings. Constantín suspects it was planted. He was reportedly placed in a punishment cell for at least 15 days, without family visits or his daily phone call. IAPA has demanded his release and an independent investigation. The Committee to Protect Journalists has also called for his release.

That is what happens today to a newspaper that follows Martí’s example.

The list of “terrorists”

Writing from New York would not necessarily have spared Martí the regime’s accusations, either. On December 7, 2023, the Interior Ministry published Resolution 19/2023 in Extraordinary Official Gazette No. 83, listing 61 people as alleged terrorists. They included commentators and influencers Alexander Otaola, Eliécer Ávila and Liu Santiesteban. The regime later took a version of its list to the United Nations and sought other countries’ cooperation in arrests and extraditions. Interior Ministry criminal investigation official Víctor Álvarez used the label “cyberterrorism.” These are Havana’s designations, not proof of a criminal conviction.

The Party’s official newspaper had already targeted this outlet. On December 28, 2020, Granma singled out independent Cuban media, including Cubanos por el Mundo, CiberCuba, ADN Cuba, Cubita Now, Cubanet, Periodismo de Barrio, El Toque, El Estornudo and YucaByte. It emphasized that their directors lived abroad, mostly in the United States, and alleged that their communication strategies copied US political designs.

A man who founded a party to liberate Cuba, raised money in exile and wrote against the island’s government every week would fit the profile the regime condemns.

In March 2022, London’s Chiswick Auctions offered a document signed by Martí in New York on January 29, 1895, on Cuban Revolutionary Party delegation stationery. That same day, Martí, José María Rodríguez and Enrique Collazo signed the order for the uprising. Today, the Interior Ministry would use that very letterhead to brand him a terrorist.

Martí under Castro: dead, imprisoned or exiled

With the same ideas, the same pen and the same courage, a Martí living under today’s Cuban system would face three possible fates.

Death, as in the case of the three young men executed in April 2003 after summary trials for hijacking a ferry to flee the country, an incident in which no one was killed. Prison, like Rowland, Brandon, Mayelín or Henry Constantín in his punishment cell. Or exile, perhaps with his name printed in the Official Gazette as a “terrorist.”

Exile under Castro’s system has two doors. The first leads out. José Luis Tan Estrada, a Camagüey journalist and now a columnist for this outlet, left Cuba under pressure in December 2024 after being warned at the airport of serious consequences if he returned, according to Reporters Without Borders. Nicaragua denied him entry, and he ultimately crossed more than a dozen countries, including the Darién jungle, before reaching Mexico.

Art historian Carolina Barrero was detained in January 2022 and given 48 hours to leave; she arrived in Madrid. Artist Hamlet Lavastida left for Poland with his partner, writer Katherine Bisquet, after more than three months in custody. Exile was the price of his release.

José Daniel Ferrer was taken from prison to a flight to Miami in October 2025. It echoed the arrangement used in 2010 for Black Spring prisoners released on condition that they leave for Spain: a foreign country, another life, starting over.

The second door leads back in—and it can be shut even when you hold a ticket. American Airlines twice denied San Isidro Movement curator Anamely Ramos boarding in Miami in February 2022 after Havana said she would not be admitted. In June 2022, Southwest prevented professor Omara Ruiz Urquiola from boarding in Fort Lauderdale under instructions from Cuban authorities. She had left the island for medical care.

In early October, singer Baby Lores said he was removed from a plane in Miami shortly before departure. He was traveling to see his mother in intensive care. According to his account, Cuba had refused to authorize his entry.

For those who stay, there is a third door: their own front door, which authorities can block from the outside without a court order. On January 28, 2026, State Security agents stopped Yoani Sánchez in the street and ordered her home until the next day. Her husband, journalist Reinaldo Escobar, was intercepted and forced back home. Berta Soler, Ángel Moya and journalist Boris González also faced restrictions that day. They had been invited to a reception at the US chief of mission’s residence.

ARTICLE 19 has documented restrictions preventing journalist Camila Acosta from leaving home. In March 2026, Reporters Without Borders described her situation as effectively house arrest. For the first half of 2026, the Cuban Observatory for Human Rights reported 488 illegal retentions of people in their homes. Their own doorway becomes a checkpoint, with a patrol car on the corner.

Spain exiled Martí twice, but after the Pact of Zanjón it allowed him to return to Cuba in 1878. Today, many Cubans cannot count on even that. If he stayed and kept speaking, Anna Bensi’s experience offers another possible parallel: convicted, watched and unable to leave.

The regime can publish all the anniversary tributes it wants. Every time it displays the photograph of Martí in chains, it offers a portrait of its own methods. Colonial Spain jailed a teenager for disloyalty expressed on paper. Castro’s successors have carried that logic into the age of the smartphone.

English adaptation of the Spanish-language opinion column by Ernesto García, published October 21, 2026. Corrected October 21, 2026: an earlier version misstated the age range of minors prosecuted after July 11 and the outcome of Yudinela Castro’s detention.