Cuba: ‘A Creative, Hard-Working People Who Do Not Give Up’ (I)

Dec. 24, 2025

The following is a speech by Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and the country’s president. Díaz-Canel addressed the closing of the 11th Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba on December 13, 2025, in Havana.

The meeting was held amid extreme challenges facing the Cuban people, a product of more than 60 years of economic warfare by the U.S. government. The U.S. embargo is a “siege especially designed to punish rebel Cuba for its bold effort to remain free, independent, and sovereign just a few miles from the empire,” Díaz-Canel said.

Conditions of daily life in Cuba are worsening in large degree due to Washington’s economic war exacerbated by new sanctions U.S. president Donald Trump imposed during his first term in the Oval Office. Trump also added Cuba to the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, severely restricting the country’s ability to conduct normal financial transactions abroad. Importing fuel, medicine, machinery, and other essential commodities has become more difficult and, in many cases, impossible. Cuba’s health care, food production, power-generating, and other sectors of its economy are being stretched to their limits.