Our family left Cuba in 1964, so we remember the tense period of the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis. As I recall, the Castro regime kept putting the military on alert with anti-aircraft weapons in El Malecon, the famous avenue around Havana and the ocean. All of a sudden, as my parents said, the soldiers replaced the young couples who would take romantic walks under that Havana moon.

It was done back then to prepare the nation against "los yankis" or the invasion that the Castro regime kept talking about. He had the entire nation thinking that it was coming any day, any hour, any moment.

Anyway, the soldiers are back in the street many years later. This is a story about the latest mobilization:

Entrenched in their “Homeland or Death” chant and vowing to prevail against the “imperialist onslaught,” Cuba’s leader have paused the release of political prisoners and kicked off military exercises following President Donald Trump’s first-day decision to put the country back on the list of nations that sponsor terrorism.

Just a week earlier, former President Joe Biden had taken Cuba off the list after telling Congress the Cuban government did not provide “any support for international terrorism during the preceding six-month period.”

Trump also nullified Biden’s decision to eliminate a list of sanctioned Cuban military companies and hotels.

Biden’s measures were instrumental in a deal mediated by the Vatican, under which the Cuban government agreed to release 553 “prisoners.” While it was unclear whether some or all would be political prisoners, shortly after Biden’s announcement Cuban authorities started releasing political prisoners, as many as 170, according to a recount by an independent media coalition.

But that came to a halt after Trump reversed Biden’s actions on Monday evening shortly after his inauguration.

So the regime cancelled prisoner releases and put the soldiers on the streets again.

My parents are gone but those of their generation must be watching all this and wondering if this a rerun of those early days of "la revolucion." I remember as a kid playing baseball on a sandlot about 250 feet from one of those anti-aircraft weapons. In retrospect, maybe one of us kids would have started a war by hitting a soldier with a fly ball. Who knows he could have mistaken the fly ball for a bomb and started shooting at the imaginary jet?

These actions confirm that the Cuban regime is a bit concerned with the Trump-Rubio team. In other words, they fear that the Trump administration will actually enforce the embargo and put an end to remittances flowing into Cuba. They need a soft embargo and those dollars flowing.

So time passes and nothing changes. Cuba does not change but it fears Trump a lot. And that's the best news that the Cuban political prisoners can get.

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Image: Flickr/Thomassin Mickaël