95% of Cubans want a regime change, poll shows

Around 95% of Cubans who responded to an ADN Cuba’s poll on Tuesday said they wanted regime change on the island, while 5 percent said they did not.

The survey was conducted during a live broadcast on ADN Cuba's Facebook and YouTube platforms, in which Doctor of Philosophy Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat and former political prisoner Luis Zúñiga were interviewed about the talks between Washington and Havana.

Fifty-nine percent of those polled said they disapproved of the meeting between the two countries to curb the wave of migration, while 29% said they agreed and 12% were undecided.

Users were also asked whether they considered Cubans on the island to be living under a modern form of slavery. Ninety-five percent said yes, while 5 percent said no.

Scientist Oscar Casanella told ADN Cuba that "95% of Cubans surveyed responding that they want a total change of system in Cuba is an expected result due to the trend of previous surveys."

"I have designed and processed political opinion polls applied in the streets of Cuba, and at every moment of application, the results show percentages always higher than 70% and increasing over time," Casanella added.

During the broadcast, Cuban exile leader in Florida, Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat, read a statement from the Assembly of Cuban Resistance (ARC), which he chairs.

The coalition of Cuban opposition organizations expressed in the statement their rejection of the announcement of the beginning of immigration negotiations between the U.S. government "and the communist tyranny of Cuba."

"These negotiations at this moment are wrong," for several reasons, said ARC, adding that the Castro government "is a regime that violates human rights and has committed and continues to commit crimes against humanity."

"The exchange at the negotiating level of this kind less than a year after the July 11 popular uprising in Cuba with the resulting series of mass trials and convictions of protesters constitutes a real gift to a dictatorship that must be punished for its oppression of the Cuban people."

Sitting at the table with representatives from Havana sends "a message of weakness and not of support for the Cuban people, at a time when the struggle for freedom is progressively increasing in the country,” added ARC.

Luis Zúñiga, expreso político y miembro de la ARC, dijo que “la posición de la Asamblea recoge el sentir mayoritario de nuestro exilio y muy posiblemente dentro del pueblo de Cuba. Expresa el disgusto, la frustración, con las continuas, repetitivas actitudes de los gobiernos de EE. UU., especialmente demócratas, que siempre claudican en contraste con los esfuerzos del pueblo de Cuba por buscar libertad”.

Luis Zúñiga, a political exile and member of ARC, said that "the position of the Assembly reflects the majority feeling of our exile community and very possibly within the Cuban people. It expresses the displeasure, the frustration, with the continuous, repetitive attitudes of the U.S. governments, especially democrats, who always give up in contrast with the efforts of the Cuban people to seek freedom."

The governments of Washington and Havana will meet next Thursday in the U.S. capital to discuss immigration issues in the midst of an extraordinary exodus of Cubans that has brought more than 73,000 irregular migrants from the island to the U.S. in the last five months.

On Monday, Reuters reported a plan for what would be Washington's highest-level formal talks with Havana since President Joe Biden took office.

It would not be the first time the Cuban regime has used immigration as a political tool. This happened during the 1994 raft crisis to calm the protests known as "El Maleconazo," and during the 1980 Mariel crisis, when Fidel Castro went so far as to open the island's prisons and send convicted criminals to the United States.