Cuba became an independent nation on May 20, 1902, but 124 years later, the date remains one that the island's socialist government refuses to mark as a celebration.
According to ABC News, the road to independence was long and violent. It began in October 1868 on a farm in southeast Cuba with an event known as the Cry of Yara. What followed were decades of war: the Great War, lasting nearly ten years; the Little War, which continued for more than a year; then the Cuban War of Independence; and finally the Spanish-American War. When independence finally came, it arrived with conditions.
Cuba's 1902 independence was tied to the Platt Agreement, introduced by a United States senator from Connecticut. The agreement gave the U.S. the right to intervene in Cuban affairs for what it described as the preservation of Cuban independence, and allowed the American government to lease or buy land to establish naval bases on the island. Although the agreement was repealed under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, its legacy has shaped Cuban politics ever since.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel addressed the date Wednesday in a post on X, writing that there is only one thing to be grateful for on that day: "It instilled in Cubans of that time an anti-imperialist sentiment that each subsequent generation has felt deepen with new and constant threats to the independence and sovereignty of the nation." He added that May 20 represents "intervention, interference, dispossession, frustration."
The reaction among Cuban exiles and those of Cuban ancestry living in the United States is the opposite. "It is their 4th of July," said Jason Reding Quiñones, Miami's top U.S. federal prosecutor and the son of a Cuban political refugee. Reding made those remarks Wednesday while joining officials to announce a federal indictment against former Cuban President Raúl Castro, accused in connection with the 1996 downing of civilian planes flown by Miami-based exiles over Cuban waters. Reding said the date "reminds us that the pursuit of freedom, dignity and accountability spans generations and still lives alive and well in the heart of the Cuban community."
The White House issued a lengthy statement Wednesday commemorating May 20, saluting those "who have sacrificed for a free Cuba" and announcing new sanctions and what it described as severing financial lifelines to the island. "The regime in Havana today is the direct betrayal of the nation their founding patriots bled and died for," the statement read, adding that for nearly seven decades, Cuba's communist government "has violently dismantled political freedom, denied its people fair elections, viciously silenced dissent, and strangled the Cuban economy into a state of collapse."
The Cuban government responded quickly. Cuban Foreign Affairs Minister Bruno Rodríguez called the White House statement "superficial and ill-informed" in a post on X, adding that it was an "insult."
