Hope Against Hope: Cuba's Crisis and the Call to Act

Hope Against Hope: Cuba's Crisis and the Call to Act

"What strikes me most is the infinite sadness, the absolute hopelessness, the listlessness, the desperation, and the anguish with which my relatives and everyone I know in Cuba live their daily lives," said Osvaldo Gallardo, a Cuban emigrant, writer, and religious freedom activist, speaking to EWTN News about conditions on the island (Marina, 2026). He was not describing a single catastrophe. He was describing Tuesday. And Wednesday. And every day after.

The numbers behind that anguish come from the 9th Study on Social Rights in Cuba. Ninety-four percent "of Cubans live in extreme poverty. Eight out of 10 have been forced to skip a meal during the" day (Observatorio Cubano de Derechos Humanos [OCDH], 2026, August 13). These figures register material deprivation, but Gallardo insists the deeper wound runs further: "It's immeasurable; it's a total lack of meaning in life, a loss of any sense of where we are headed or what our goals are" (Marina, 2026) Existential collapse does not follow automatically from hunger, though hunger accelerates it. What Gallardo names is the severing of a person from any horizon that makes effort intelligible.

A wound statistics cannot capture

John Paul II identified exactly this species of wound in Dives in Misericordia (1980). He pointed to the "gigantic remorse" felt across the human family when wealthy and surfeited peoples coexist alongside individuals suffering destitution, "babies dying of hunger under their mothers'" eyes, and entire areas of poverty and underdevelopment (John Paul II, 1980, section 11). That remorse, John Paul II argued, traces back to a defective machinery at the root of contemporary economic arrangements, one that forecloses "the dignity of the person and his or her right to truth and freedom" (John Paul II, 1980, section 11).

"People are dying. The chronically ill are dying. People are dying of hunger. There are photos of elderly people in truly pitiful conditions. There are reports. People are dying. It's a country that's dying every day" (Marina, 2026).

The structural explanation for how a government produces this outcome is not mysterious. Ludwig von Mises, in Human Action, described societies whose centrally controlled production systems generate masses of people the economy has no use for: who "search in vain for a livelihood" because the prevailing ideology and the social system that is its offspring block the emergence of productive enterprise (1949). Cuba, after nearly seven decades of that system, has reached the condition Mises analyzed. Not occasional poverty alongside general prosperity, but the near-total exclusion of the population from the possibility of providing for itself. Gallardo registers the same conclusion without the economic vocabulary: "Hardships on the island have always been immense, but right now, the outlook is bleaker than at any other time in the history of Cuba's nearly 70-year dictatorship" (Marina,2026)

Christian hope is not a posture of waiting

Paradoxically, Gallardo also said in the same EWTN News report that he carries Christian hope (Marina, 2026). Christian hope is a theological virtue directed toward a definite good that exceeds present circumstances; it is not optimism about how things will improve on their own. The Catechism roots it in God's promises rather than in favorable odds (Catholic Church, 2000, para. 1817). What that means practically is that Christian hope generates action rather than suspending it. To hope in the Christian sense is to act as though the good one hopes for is already making a claim on the present.

For Cuba, that claim takes several specific forms. The Church on the island, Gallardo notes, operates under state constraint so tight it cannot run a soup kitchen or expand a nursing home without government control, and it lacks the financial capacity to do more even where permission exists. Remittances from family members are already among the primary means by which Cubans survive. Advocacy that keeps the island's condition visible in international discourse is another form that hope takes.

Gaudium et Spes observed that economic development, when guided in a reasonable and human way, can reduce social inequalities, but when it serves other ends, it embitters them instead, leaving the majority "deprived of almost all possibility of acting on their own initiative and responsibility" (Vatican Council II, 1965). Cuba is what that deprivation looks like at scale, across generations. The appropriate response is neither sentimentality nor political abstraction. It is committed, concrete solidarity: sending aid, speaking publicly, refusing to let a dying country disappear from view. Gallardo models exactly that by speaking at all.

A country dying every day does not need observers. It needs witnesses willing to act.

References

Catholic Church. (2000). Catechism of the Catholic Church (2nd ed.).

John Paul II. (1980). Dives in Misericordia. Vatican Polyglot Press. Section 11.

Marina, D.L. (2026, August 19). ‘A country that’s dying every day’: 94% of Cubans live in extreme poverty. EWTN News.https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/americas/a-country-thats-dying-every-day-94-percent-of-cubans-live-in-extreme-poverty

Mises, L. von. (1949). Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Yale University Press. p. 832.

Observatorio Cubano de Derechos Humanos. (2026, August 13) IX Study on Social Rights in Cuba: extreme poverty reaches 94% and rejection of the government's management reaches 95%. https://observacuba.org/derechos-sociales-cuba-2026-extrema-pobreza-y-rechazo-gestion-gobierno-ascienden/

Vatican Council II. (1965). Gaudium et Spes: Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. Vatican Polyglot Press. Section on economic and social inequality.