hISTORY eNDS EVERYWHERE:

Luis Emilio Aybar is a voice from the left, which in Cuba means pretty far left. By any measure, he should be a stalwart defender of the island's communist regime. After widespread public protests that two weeks ago roiled the nation, the 34-year-old published an article in the magazine La Tizza, which bills itself as "a space to think about socialism".

After the prerequisite denunciation of the US, he wrote: "What happened on 11 July is also because we communists and revolutionaries do not fight with sufficient force and efficiency the harmful practices of the state.

"We defend unity in a way that actually harms it ... We uncritically follow our leaders instead of rectifying their path. We agree to be disciplined, when what we have to do is think and act with our own heads." In authoritarian Cuba, that sounded a lot like heresy. [...]

[I]n his essay for La Tizza, Aybar strayed surprisingly close to another analysis, summarised by the Financial Times when it called Cuba a last "lonely outpost of Marxist central planning".

"During 2020, half of the country's investments were allocated to hotel construction at a time when there was a drastic decrease in international tourism and an acute shortage of investment in agriculture," he wrote. He said 11 July needed to be a watershed. "A failure to pressure the government from the left means that the right will take the initiative", meaning "more market, more private property, less education and public health."

Only time will reveal whether internal reform will satisfy the population. Another increasingly robust critic from within, Cuba's former ambassador to the EU, Carlos Alzugaray, believes it will have to. He has just published an article saying it is "essential" that the government "not make the mistake of blaming only external factors".

He was watching the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics on television as he pointed out that, despite the efforts of critics in the US, regimes such as China, Vietnam and Cuba have proved durable, and "very difficult to overthrow". It is his view that Cuba should follow China and Vietnam towards "a market economy with socialist orientation".

Before he could get into that - or the government's potential reaction to the criticism from within - the pride in Cuba's sovereignty that has always been a far greater and more unifying force than communism on the island revealed itself.

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