Gustavo P\u00e9rez Firmat,<\/a> would write a Pulitzer Prize-nominated book taking the toast as its title.<\/p>\nThe saying was proof that the Cuban exile community didn\u2019t think they\u2019d be in Miami for long \u2014 proof that the hope of return was more than just hope. It was a plan. That toast, however, began to fade over the years. The taller I grew, the less I heard it. The plan had changed.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been decades since anyone uttered \u201cnext year in Cuba\u201d in my house. That saying requires hope. Had hope died?<\/p>\n
Perhaps because of my start as a visual artist, whenever I think of hope and Cuba, I think of the artist, Angel Delgado, who created a piece called La Esperanza es lo \u00daltimo que se Est\u00e1 Perdiendo (Hope is the Last Thing We are Losing).<\/p>\n
In 1990, Delgado created a performance in Havana, during which he walked into a state-sanctioned art exhibition, largely unnoticed at first. He set a circle of tiny green bones printed on paper on the ground, placed himself at the center of that circle, took out a copy of Granma, the official paper in Cuba \u2014 which holds only the singular, proselytizing voice of the regime \u2014 and proceeded to defecate on it.<\/p>\n
A clear act of protest through art, the action came at a time, Delgado told me, when he felt repression closing in on his voice as an artist. Nineteen ninety was one year after the Berlin Wall fell, one year before the Soviet Union\u2019s collapse. Cuba\u2019s regime had a choice at this juncture. It chose to dig its claws in.<\/p>\n
Delgado was imprisoned for six months for Hope. What would ensue on the island would soon be known as the \u201cSpecial Period,\u201d a period without Soviet subsidy, when the people of Cuba starved, lacking both food and freedom.<\/p>\n
Not by coincidence, on this side of the diaspora in mid-90s Miami, I stopped hearing \u201cnext year in Cuba.\u201d<\/p>\n
On a recent phone call with Delgado, who now lives in Las Vegas, I ask him about Hope, both his piece and whether he sees any hope for Cuba.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe system that the government has in place,\u201d he said, \u201cit\u2019s impossible to do something through art and civic society. They always do the same, imprison the leaders \u2026 plant fear. The only thing that could change things, it would have to be an intervention, a very careful intervention. It\u2019s not what I would ideally want, but\u2026I just don\u2019t see another way. A dictatorship doesn\u2019t leave on its own.\u201d<\/p>\n
On May 20, when the U.S. government indicted Raul Castro for shooting down American civilian pilots (Brothers to the Rescue), I visited my 94-year-old grandmother. I didn\u2019t know what she would say or if she\u2019d even heard the news. News travels differently when you\u2019re 94. When I\u2019d gone to her after Fidel Castro\u2019s death, this woman who had once hoped against hope, just shrugged her shoulders and told me it would all remain the same. The regime, she clarified, was still in power. Brutally entrenched.<\/p>\n
This time, when I sat next to my grandmother and asked her if she\u2019d heard the news about Raul\u2019s indictment, she nodded, almost not looking at me.<\/p>\n
\u201cY?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n
There was a pause that felt eternal.<\/p>\n
I could hear both of us breathing. And then, almost imperceptible, the beginning of a smile at the corners of her lips, the shadow of a grin. She turned to me with her permanently glassy eyes, the face I\u2019ve looked into for comfort all my life. Now she searched my eyes. \u201cSera verdad?\u201d she asked. \u201cCould it be \u2026?\u201d<\/p>\n
There it was again, that sliver of hope, exhausted and beaten, but present.<\/p>\n
Hope doesn\u2019t always look like what we think it will look like. It\u2019s grittier, grayer than expected. It is, indeed, the last thing we are losing, and what, against all hope, we can\u2019t afford to lose.<\/p>\n
Vanessa Garcia is an author and screenwriter. She\u2019s currently working on a book about her grandfather, who escaped three tyrannies: Franco, Hitler and Fidel Castro.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cuban Americans gathered at Versailles Restaurant in Little Havana in May after the U.S announced a federal indictment…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":310979,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[225,227,226],"class_list":["post-310978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-hialeah","tag-hialeah","tag-hialeah-headlines","tag-hialeah-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310978\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/310979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Cuban](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/MIA_112cRaulCIndictment20NEWPPP.JPG\" "\\"Cuban")
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