I left Cuba when I was 10. My parents took me to Germany in 2001, and I have lived there ever since. Part of my family never left. When I call them, the conversation follows a script none of us wrote: how many hours the power was out, which medicine the pharmacy no longer has, which cousin is thinking about going.
So when Washington debates Cuba again, as it is doing this fall, I listen for one thing. Not who sounds tougher, but who ends up paying.
Let me say plainly where I stand, because on Cuba everyone is expected to choose one-half of the truth. I oppose the embargo. I think it has failed for more than six decades to do what it promised. And I hold Cuba’s leadership responsible for the repression it carries out every single day. Those positions do not cancel each other out. They are what most Cubans I know actually believe.
Start with the half Havana would prefer nobody counted. At the end of September, the human rights organization Prisoners Defenders listed 1,351 political prisoners in Cuba, which it called a new all-time record. In September alone, 50 names were added to its list. Among the prisoners are 152 women and 40 people who were minors when they were arrested.
These are not abstractions. They are people who protested when the lights went out, who wrote something on Facebook, who said in public what millions say in their kitchens. The embargo did not put them behind bars. A government did, one that has blamed Washington for every failure it could have fixed itself.
That is why any deal with Havana has to begin here. Not with a promise, not with a few symbolic releases timed for a press conference, but with every political prisoner freed and the result verified by observers the regime does not control. A deal without that is not diplomacy. It is a reward.
Now, the other half, the one that gets less attention in Washington.
On Sept. 29, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced that, effective the next day, it would remove the authorization that had allowed U.S. banks to hold accounts in the name of Cuba’s independent private entrepreneurs. Banks must now immediately block those accounts. To get their own money back, the owners need a specific license from OFAC.
Think about who these account holders are. They are bakers and mechanics, software developers and the owners of small shops and cafés. They built the only part of Cuba’s economy that does not answer to the state. For years, Washington told them it was on their side. In 2024, the Treasury itself changed the rules precisely so that they could bank in the United States. Many did, because they trust American banks more than Cuban ones. Now that trust has been turned against them.
There is a better way to be tough. This year, the administration created a new sanctions program, signed on May 1, aimed at those responsible for Cuba repression. Its first targets, on May 7, included GAESA, the military-run conglomerate that controls much of Cuba’s hard-currency economy. That is pressure aimed at the right address. Blocking a baker’s savings is not.
The regime has its own channels, its own companies, its own ways to move money. A Cuban who sells bread does not. When his account is frozen, the state loses nothing. He loses everything he managed to put aside, and he learns a lesson Havana has been teaching for decades: that nothing you build on your own is safe. That is exactly the message the regime wants him to hear.
Meanwhile, daily life keeps falling apart. By early August, Cuba had suffered its sixth nationwide grid collapse of 2026. Germany’s Foreign Office strongly advises against travel to the island and warns that, because of severe shortages of medicine and supplies, travelers cannot count on being treated in an emergency. If foreigners cannot count on care, imagine what that means for an 80-year-old in Camagüey, the province where I grew up.
Pressure on Havana and help for ordinary Cubans are not opposites. A serious policy does both at the same time.
First, it makes the release of every political prisoner the price of any easing, verified independently and nonnegotiable.
Second, it keeps the pressure on the military conglomerates and the officials who profit from repression.
Third, it stops punishing the people Washington says it wants to strengthen. Restore banking authorization for independent entrepreneurs, with the same screening that applies to everyone else, so that money earned outside the state stays with the people who earned it.
TRUMP TOPPLED MADURO. NOW IT’S TIME TO INVADE CUBA
None of this is softness on the regime. It is the opposite. A Cuban entrepreneur with a working bank account depends less on the state than one without. A released prisoner is a living reproach to the government that jailed him. Both outcomes cost Havana something real, and both help the people who have paid the most.
Cubans have heard enough speeches from both capitals. What they need is a deal that can be measured: every political prisoner out, every independent business allowed to keep what it earns. Anything less will be one more agreement made over their heads.
Aciel Martinez Poll is a Cuban-born actor, singer and author who has lived in Germany since 2001. He grew up in the province of Camagüey.