Cuban journalist shares plea to Marco Rubio for harsher pressure on Havana

A Cuban voice in a video shared by Mario Pentón is pleading directly for Marco Rubio to keep tightening the screws on Havana, calling the island an "inferno on earth" and asking Washington to intensify pressure on the communist government. The clip lands in the middle of a moment when exile politics, sanctions, and daily survival in Cuba are colliding with unusual force.

The appeal comes after Donald Trump said on March 17 that Cuba was in "very bad shape" and said the island was talking to Rubio. Three days later, Rubio said Cuba is a "disaster" under its communist government. Together, the comments and the video point to a familiar but sharpened divide in the Cuba debate: some exiles and dissidents see pressure as the only language Havana understands, while others say more punishment only deepens the suffering of ordinary families already living through shortages and long blackouts.

That tension sharpened again in early April, when the Cuban government announced the release of 2,010 prisoners as a humanitarian gesture. Human Rights Watch said none of the people identified by rights groups among those released were political prisoners, and that more than 700 political prisoners still remained behind bars. In Cuba, where repression and scarcity often overlap, that detail matters as much as any speech in Washington. For many families, the question is not whether the government is under pressure, but who pays the price when pressure rises.

The broader policy architecture is already in place. Trump kept Cuba on the U.S. state sponsor of terrorism list after taking office in January 2025, and he had already ended the suspension of Helms-Burton Title III in 2019, opening the door to lawsuits over confiscated Cuban property and expanding legal and economic pressure on the island. At the same time, U.S. and Cuban officials met in Havana on April 20, a reminder that even as Washington pushes for reforms, channels between the two governments have not gone completely dark.

Pentón’s decision to amplify the plea makes the divide impossible to miss. On one side are Cubans who believe only harsher pressure can break a system they see as irredeemable. On the other are those who say every new layer of sanctions, legal pressure, and isolation lands first on families trying to get through the week. In a country already defined by shortages, repression, and electricity cuts, that argument is no abstraction. It is the daily cost of "more pressure.