Havana — At sunrise on Thursday, the broad sweep of the Malecón filled with people and percussion. Thousands of Cubans, students in white guayaberas, workers in factory T-shirts, soldiers in pressed fatigues, moved toward the fortress-like facade of the US Embassy and raised Palestinian flags to the wind. They came to denounce the war in Gaza and to insist that a ceasefire announced hours earlier be more than a pause. The demonstration, choreographed by the state and fronted by President Miguel Díaz-Canel, turned the seafront boulevard into a gallery of slogans: peace for Gaza, an end to blockade, sovereignty for Palestine, dignity for Cuba.
The day’s choreography contained hard edges. Embassy services were suspended, interviews deferred, a notice posted that only emergencies would be handled. Loudspeakers carried speeches along the seawall while buses kept pulling up with more attendees, some ferried in before dawn. A tide of small flags, Palestinian tri-colors and Cuban banners, often taped to the same stick, rose and fell with the chants. The government called it an act of solidarity with a besieged people; the crowd called it justice overdue. For a nation in shortage, Havana suddenly had abundance: of sound, of symbolism, of bodies packed shoulder to shoulder in a state-organized show of sentiment.
It was not lost on anyone that this spectacle arrived the same morning that Israel and Hamas confirmed the first phase of the agreement. The contours are still taking shape: a pause to fighting; a phased release of hostages and detainees; repositioning of troops; a ramp-up of humanitarian corridors meant to restore something like civilian life to the Gaza Strip. US officials framed the deal as a gateway, not an end point, that requires ratification, clear timelines, and verification mechanisms that can survive the politics on both sides. In Havana, that geopolitics was rendered in shorthand. Speakers praised a diplomatic opening, then warned that pauses without accountability tend to collapse under their own weight.
In the crowd, expectations and doubt lived side by side. Many cited a cycle they say they have watched too many times: an initial cessation of strikes, a slow unspooling of goodwill, then a violent return to the status quo ante. A university student, draped in a keffiyeh, described the logic in plain language: ceasefires are not peace; peace is the absence of bombardment and the presence of rights. Around her, older Cubans nodded in recognition, the way people do when they hear their own skepticism voiced by someone far younger. If the ceasefire holds, they said, that will be a beginning. If it fails, then Thursday’s display would be ledger and witness, a record that Havana stood where, in its own telling, it has always stood.
The state’s hand was everywhere. Díaz-Canel appeared at the head of the rally, ringed by ministers and party cadres, flanked by security. Union banners and block committees turned out in formation. The island’s media carried live pictures of the embassy esplanade and the spillover along Calle L and the Malecón’s stone benches. That tight alignment, government, broadcasters, mass organizations, fits Cuba’s political grammar, especially on questions where foreign policy and domestic scarcity collide. But the crowd also contained something harder to program: a granular inventory of grief collected online and by word of mouth for two years running, now brought to the street, names and neighborhoods in Gaza, hospital wards without power, bread lines under drones, a child’s photograph taped to a piece of cardboard.
Thursday’s convergence also revealed the way the Gaza war has threaded itself into the island’s everyday. Cuba is in the teeth of a deep economic crisis, chronic shortages of food, medicine and fuel; power cuts that bend workdays and family routines; an exodus of young people to the United States and Europe. Against that backdrop, a ceasefire far away risks reading as abstraction. The rally worked to counter that distance. Speakers folded the embargo, inflation and migration into a single story about pressure from the north, about asymmetric power and the communities that bear it. The result was both familiar and pointed: solidarity as foreign policy and as domestic theater.
At street level, the morning unfolded in waves. Early arrivals gathered under a blue that had not yet grown hot, the sea slapping the rocks in tight rhythms. By eight, the crowd had thickened into a single organism. Organizers passed out placards in Spanish and English. A small drumline found the same pattern that animates baseball games, then shifted to a march cadence as the first speeches began. People filmed everything, old Nokias and new iPhones held aloft, anchoring the day to the archives of social media. From the embassy, concrete and glass mirrored back the crowd’s movement, a reflection that some described as both literal and symbolic: protests flickering against a building that contains the visas so many here seek.
That irony, chanting at the door you hope one day to pass through, was discussed with the frankness that has long characterized private conversations in Havana. A line cook from Vedado, who said his sister has a visa interview scheduled for later this month, shook his head at the optics and shrugged at the logistics. “We need to be seen,” he said, “and she needs to be seen. Today they will see us both.” He was not the only one who held two ideas without apology: that the Gaza war must end with something enforceable; and that the pipeline off the island must remain open for those who have decided, after long calculation, to leave.
Diplomacy elsewhere moved on a more rigid timetable. In Cairo and Sharm el-Sheikh, negotiators set out contingency ladders: hostage releases in tranches, prisoner lists that require verification, a belt of monitors around crossing points, aid convoys that must be counted and not just promised. In Israel, the government prepared to ratify the deal even as parts of its coalition telegraphed resistance. In Gaza, militants balanced their own factions’ demands against the grief of families who want remains returned and a chance to bury the dead. The architecture of a pause is built with that kind of sequencing, do one thing, verify it, then do the next, because the alternative is collapse.
Cuba’s appearance in this larger frame is not incidental. For decades Havana has positioned itself as a champion of the Palestinian cause at the United Nations and in the Non-Aligned Movement. It is the posture of a small country that reads the world through the lens of sovereignty and intervention. Thursday’s rally amplified that posture, wrapping it in the immediacies of 2025: rising food prices, grid stress, irregular migration, and a humid summer that never seemed to end. To watch the speeches was to see an old alignment dressed in new data points, and to see a domestic political class making use of a foreign crisis to re-center its narrative at home.
Inside the crowd, the registers were plural. Some carried posters with the faces of hostages held since 2023 and the Hebrew word for life. Others held hand-painted signs with names from Gaza City and Rafah and the curt flourish “presente,” a Cuban memorial idiom. One young man had written a date across his forearm in black marker: Oct. 7. He added a second above it: the current morning. When asked why, he replied that calendars in this region can lie, that they measure time in days when what matters are hours, minutes and long nights. “You have to count differently,” he said, “if you want to know what it costs to make the bombs stop.”
The costs, everywhere, are heavy. Health officials in the enclave have for months published tallies that strain comprehension, and independent monitors have documented entire neighborhoods reduced to glass powder and reinforced steel. In Israel, families of the kidnapped have taught the world the grammar of dread, of empty chairs at kitchen tables and the way that absence knifes through the most ordinary rituals. Across the region, the conflict has pulled neighboring states into a ricochet of rocket fire and air defenses: Lebanon and northern Israel trading strikes, Yemen’s Houthis extending reach into shipping lanes, Iran and Israel in their long face-off at the margins. That is the geometry any ceasefire must redraw if it hopes to last.
In Havana, the geometry of the morning was simpler. The line of people ran west along the Malecón and bent inland, halted at police tape and shifted left, halted again and shifted right. A small boy stood on the seawall and tried to count flags. A woman argued, laughing, with a friend about the right verse to a chant. An elderly man who had elbowed his way to the front asked, “¿Ya empezó?” Has it started? The reply came from a chorus: “Ya empezó hace rato.” It started a while ago. Cuban humor is built for this, clear-eyed about the grind, puncturing the solemn with a smile without surrendering to it. The speeches went on. People held their spot under the sun.
By late morning, as the crowd began to thin, a second conversation took hold: what comes next for Cuba’s own relationship with Washington. Practical matters intruded. If visa services remain delayed because of demonstrations, how quickly will the schedule recover? If the embassy trims appointments, will there be new openings or a longer queue? How will families planning their own departures reconcile the timelines of diplomacy in the Middle East with the clerical machinery of migration on the island? They are the sort of questions that never quite fit into official statements but shape daily life in a place where the state and the street are always in negotiation.
Those negotiations, too, have directions other than confrontation. On the Malecón, a pair of young diplomats, one Cuban, one from a European mission, stood to the side swapping notes on procedural details that would never make it to television: how police man stations during state events, which lane closes first for the buses, which entrance Embassy staff use when the plaza fills. It was a reminder that the spectacle of protest is underwritten by logistics and that, for all the cameras and chants, the city’s ability to handle a crowd remains a kind of quiet competence in difficult times.
It is easy to over-interpret any single Havana rally. The state can fill the streets when it wants to. That does not erase the genuine feeling among many Cubans who view the Gaza conflict through a moral lens and who see in its asymmetries a reflection of their own history. Nor does it mean that dissent, about domestic economics, about the pace of reform, about the costs of emigration, has evaporated. Rather, the morning along the seafront offered a layered portrait: obedience and conviction, program and improvisation. People came because committees told them to come. People came because they wanted to. In Cuba, both can be true.
Toward the end, a small improvisation broke the set script. A group of students rolled out a length of paper and invited passersby to write what a sustainable peace would require beyond a ceasefire: border definitions that survive elections; a timetable for releases that has actual teeth; monitors who do more than watch; courts that can admit evidence gathered amid rubble; a reconstruction plan that lists warehouses and cranes rather than just promises. The paper filled quickly. A woman wrote that the word “after” is where most conflicts go to fail. “After a pause,” she wrote, “comes the work that matters.” Those around her murmured assent. They taped the sheet to the seawall as the last speech gave way to an anthem, then to the hiss of tires and the grind of bus gears as long lines began to move.
That is where Havana left it: on the hinge between a diplomatic announcement abroad and a political performance at home, between a promise that could reorder regional years and a morning that temporarily re-ordered one city’s rhythm. Cuba will measure the ceasefire, as the rest of the world will, by what happens next: whether hostages are returned to their families, whether prisoners are released in the numbers pledged, whether convoys get through without turning into bargaining chips, whether artillery stays quiet when politics turn loud again. If those tests are passed, Thursday’s rally will read as the island’s early cheer for a path to quiet. If they are not, it will read as something else: evidence that promises were made and that the people who gathered along the Malecón expected them to be kept.
On the way home, as the noon heat began its customary hammering, a group of friends detoured to a corner stand for paper cones of peanuts. A boy counted the cones and demanded one more for the walk. His mother, who said she had not missed a single rally in the past year, bought it and laughed. “Peace is not a slogan,” she said, and then, after a beat, “but you have to start somewhere.” She shifted the flags to her other hand and the group set off down the avenue, the sea on their right, the city returning to its post-rally sound, a little less amplified, a little more ordinary, and, for the moment, charged with the echo of chants that had attempted, however briefly, to bend history toward mercy.
