European Parliament hears Ferrer on Cuba's worsening crisis and repression

José Daniel Ferrer used a European Parliament hearing in Brussels to push for more than sympathy. The opposition leader and former political prisoner told lawmakers that Cuba was living through the “worst crisis in its modern history,” and urged tougher action against the government, including Magnitsky-style sanctions.

Ferrer appeared before a joint session of the Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs and Subcommittee on Human Rights on May 5, 2026, as part of a wider European tour that began in Madrid on Friday, May 2. The trip is set to take him to more than 10 European countries, where he is meeting lawmakers, governments and human rights groups to rally support for the Cuba Liberation Agreement, a democratic transition plan signed in Miami on March 2 by more than 30 exile organizations.

The hearing carried the weight of Ferrer’s own history. Cuba revoked his conditional release and that of fellow opposition figure Félix Navarro on April 29, 2025, a move Amnesty International condemned as a human rights violation and followed with an urgent action on May 8, 2025 demanding both men’s immediate and unconditional release. Ferrer thanked the European Parliament for its solidarity and said that without it he might not have survived the prisons of the Cuban communist regime.

That history matters in Brussels because the Parliament has already shown it is willing to put Cuba on the record. On September 19, 2024, it adopted a resolution on Ferrer’s case by 380 votes to 182, with 51 abstentions, demanding his immediate and unconditional release. But the larger question now is whether that symbolic pressure can move into something sharper, especially with the EU-Cuba Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement in force provisionally since November 1, 2017. Some European lawmakers, including members of the Patriots for Europe group, have recently pushed to suspend EU agreements with Havana.

The crisis Ferrer described is not only political. By mid-May 2026, Reuters-based reporting said Cuban officials had acknowledged that fuel reserves had run out, as Havana faced some of the worst rolling blackouts in decades and severe shortages of diesel and fuel oil. With food, energy and basic services worsening at once, Ferrer’s Brussels appeal landed as a test of whether the European Union will keep treating Cuba as a file for statements, or start using the tools, funding leverage and sanctions language that could actually bite.