Robles has long chronicled Cuba’s recurring cycles of hope, repression and promised change. She talks to LatAm Journalism review about a story that never quite stops repeating itself.
A great deal has changed in Cuba this year, much of it tied to renewed pressure from the United States. Venezuela, one of the island’s closest allies, dramatically reduced the oil and financial support it once provided. Governments across Latin America have begun cutting ties with Cuba’s overseas medical missions. And in a rare public acknowledgment, President Miguel Diaz-Canel confirmed that his government has been in talks with Washington.
Few journalists have reported on that quiet reordering as closely as Frances Robles. Based in Florida, Robles has spent more than 25 years reporting on Cuba and the region, often from places where independent journalism is challenging, if not dangerous, to practice. She started her career at the Miami Herald, where she served as bureau chief in Managua and Bogotá. In 2013, she joined The New York Times, where she covers Latin America and the Caribbean. She’s known by her colleagues as “Frenchie” or the “Cuba Whisperer.”
Robles, 57, a native New Yorker (with an inflection that shows it) of Puerto Rican background, has received numerous awards, including the Maria Moors Cabot Prize in 2024 for outstanding reporting in the Americas. In this conversation with LatAm Journalism Review (LJR), edited for length and clarity, she spoke about reporting on Cuba from afar, reading between the lines of state media and the importance of learning to drive stick shift.
In 2024, Frances Robles received the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for outstanding reporting in the Americas. (Photo: Chris Taggart, Columbia University)
LJR: In March, you broke a story with several scoops, reporting that the Trump administration wants to push President Díaz-Canel out of office, that the Trump administration likely wants a compliant regime rather than regime change and that one of Raul Castro’s grandsons is probably the point person in negotiations with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. What can you tell us about how to report from inside governments that seem to be locked boxes?
Robles: It’s really hard. I have no tips or guidance on how to manage that locked box because the Cuban government runs a tight ship. I’m not one of the people they give visas to, so you have to work on the periphery. You have to talk to people who are talking to them. It helps to have been around for a long time. So if I call somebody, chances are they’ve heard my name or I interviewed them 20 years ago. But I'm not going to lie. It’s very hard.
LJR: Why do you say you’re not someone the Cuban government gives visas to?
Robles: The Cuban government wields a lot of control over who gets to go to Cuba and report there. That’s been a real challenge for any journalist covering Cuba for decades.
LJR: When was the last time you were able to do reporting on the ground?
Robles: The Cuban government gave me a visa during President Obama’s visit in 2016. It was fascinating because it had been seven years since my last visit and it was like a lifetime had passed. You saw all these nice restaurants and all these bougie people. I was, like, “What country is this?”
LJR: There was an upper class? I didn’t realize that kind of hierarchy existed in Cuba.
Robles: There was an upper class, or at least there was for a hot minute. I don’t know if there still is. They probably all live in Miami and Madrid now. But in 2016, there was a real sense of hope and optimism and excitement in the air. You could feel it. People were like, “Wow, things are going to change.” My sense is there’s an equal feeling right now, but for very different reasons. I think there’s dread and excitement in the sense that a lot of people feel that something is going to change, but they’re scared about what they’re going to have to go through before that happens.
LJR: What was it like reporting on the street during that visit?
Robles: It was amazing. We talked to people, we spent time in their homes, and I did a story that I was proud of where I talked to a lot of young people about that decision of whether to stay or go. Someone opened a bakery, another guy had a food delivery service and they were really excited about it. It was a wonderful opportunity.
LJR: How did you get into the island the time before that, in 2009?
Robles: I went to a concert. Juanes was playing a big, free concert, and it was a huge deal. I also tried to do other stories that were probably a little too ambitious. I tried doing interviews with people that the state security services had probably penetrated. And so I got a friendly call. They were very nice about it, actually. They were friendly and professional. They called me at the place where I was staying. They said, “You’re not here to work, right?” I said, “Oh, but I’m going to enjoy the concert.” They said, “Ok, but you’re not here to work, right?” I was scheduled to leave, anyway, so they didn’t kick me out, per se. I did get kicked out once before, in 2000.
LJR: And what happened then?
Robles: At the time, I wasn’t even the official Cuba reporter at the Miami Herald. I was just a rookie. It was two, three-week trips. I went on a tourism visa, and in retrospect, I can’t believe I did the things that I did. I was going to find Elián González’s family and doing interviews in his town. I was writing my stories by hand and then sending them by fax at the hotel. (González is now a member of the National Assembly.)
And one day, I was at the hotel and we were going to the town where Elián González lived, which is in Cardenas, maybe an hour-and-a-half from Havana. So I was checking out and the bellhop was super nervous and kept saying, “When are you leaving? Let me know, and I’ll carry your bags.” Then there was a driver that came to pick us up and all of the sudden, I see the bellhop running and he says something to the taxi driver and the taxi driver says to me “Excuse me. I will be right back. I have a phone call.” And I was, like, “You’re a taxi driver and you have a phone call at my hotel?!” I remember that I was on the phone with an editor and I was like, “Aquí pasa algo” [Something is going on here]. The taxi drove us to the car rental place and dropped us off. And then all of the sudden, the car rental place was filled with men in military fatigues. They said, “Can I have your papers, please?” And I was, like, “What? I’m just renting a car. I’m just a tourist.” They knew exactly who I was. That time, I was in custody for six or seven hours.
They let me go back to the hotel, but they kept my passport and they came back for me at 5 a.m. and took me in their custody and physically put me on a plane, and then gave me my passport back. They charged me for the taxi ride to the airport. They gave me a receipt.
LJR: One of your old editors told me covering Cuba is the best and worst beat at the Miami Herald because of the level of scrutiny it gets. What was it like covering Cuba for Cuban American readers in South Florida?
Robles: It’s funny. I expected the scrutiny to be worse. The only story I remember really getting huge blowback was a story I did during the years of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Chávez was giving eye surgeries and doing all these programs in Cuba. And it was true. They were doing it. But I got blowback because it was like you weren’t allowed to acknowledge that anybody was doing anything good. The readers thought it was populist propaganda.
The reason for me that it was the worst job at the Miami Herald was because you’re a Cuba correspondent and you didn’t get on the ground. As a foreign correspondent, that’s your bread and butter. You’re there to bear witness. You’re not there to talk on the phone with people. So that’s really the challenge for covering Cuba. It was a challenge 20 years ago, and it’s a challenge now. You have to make millions of phone calls. You have to see things through the lens of other people.
LJR: What role do local journalists play in your work?
Robles: They play a huge role. A lot of times, we’ll have a double byline with a local journalist. Sometimes I’m there with them, and sometimes I work with them remotely. In Haiti, I have to hire a local journalist to be with me. He accompanies me everywhere. He gives me ideas. He helps me schedule interviews. He’s a translator for me because I don’t speak Creole or French.
A lot of times, especially as a correspondent, you’re not necessarily expected to break a story, but you’re watching from afar, and you’re saying, “Wow, look at this thing that keeps happening. I better go there and see what’s going on.” So you’re also relying on the initial work that’s been published in the local press. It’s invaluable.
LJR: How much do you consume the state-approved news outlets?
Robles: I probably should be consuming more. The Cuban government press is actually very helpful. The Cuban government doesn’t give interviews and doesn’t respond to any requests, but if you dig around in their state-sanctioned media, you can usually find the kinds of quotes that you wanted. Sometimes, they cover real issues. I’m doing a piece right now on the garbage pile up in Cuba. They’re not giving me any interviews about the garbage piling up. But if you look at Granma, if you look at Cuba Debate, you can find really in-depth articles where they’ve spoken to the community and to the city officials who are in charge of garbage pickup. Sometimes they’re self-critical. Every now and then, it can be a sincere quote. So you have to read that in order to have their point of view reflected in the stories.
LJR: Your first story in the Miami Herald mentioning Cuba ran in 1993, so you could say you’ve been following or reporting on the island for more than 30 years. What’s it like for you to cover people announcing over and over again, “No, really! Now there really is going to be regime change!”?
Robles: Yeah, it’s kind of funny. We were talking about GAESA, the military conglomerate, and someone was considering writing a story related to that. So I looked it up and there was a story that I wrote in 2006. And it was exactly this kind of moment of, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s going to happen now” because 2006 was the year that Fidel [Castro] first got sick. And then when he resigned officially in 2008, it was “Oh, ahora si” [Oh, now it will happen]. And then he died in 2016 and it was, “Ahora si!” It’s funny when I look up clips, and I find a clip that has almost the same headline as the one I’m about to write.
LJR: And it’s a story that you yourself wrote.
Robles: Correct. So I have to try hard not to be the old lady in the meeting, rolling their eyes and saying, “Yeah, we’ve kind of done this before.” And in fairness, it does feel different this time. I did a story where every single expert that I interviewed, I asked them the same question: “Does this feel different?” And every single person said, “Yes, it absolutely feels different this time.”
LJR: So when you see an echo in your own reporting, how do you make it new?
Robles: It doesn’t matter. Nobody remembers what you wrote 20 years ago. I’m lucky people remember something from three years ago! I’m finishing up an edit on a story on the Cuban property issue. When American companies and American citizens left Cuba, they left their house behind and then the government took it. Cubans also left and then they lost it. They never got it back. Well, I did almost the exact same story 10 years ago. And then I probably wrote that 10 years before that.
LJR: Why do you think there are so many echoes in your reporting?
Robles: Because a lot of the issues haven’t changed. There are still political prisoners, there’s still property that was confiscated, there still haven’t been democratic elections. Until all of that is resolved, you’re going to be writing the same story over and over again. And you have to because it’s still important.
LJR: This interview got a little unwieldy, so thank you for your patience. Is there anything you’d like to add?
Robles: Did you see the article that ran about me in The New York Times the other day?
LJR: Sure did.
Robles: They didn’t mention that I took driver’s ed. At the age of 30-something, I took driver’s ed in Managua so that I could learn to drive stick shift.
LJR: What was it that happened?
Robles: I went to rent a car in Cuba, and it was a stick shift, and I couldn’t drive it.
LJR: That must have been frustrating.
Robles: That day, I probably hired a driver, so the issue was resolved. But the point of the story was that a huge part of our job as a foreign correspondent is logistics that you don’t think about. Is there going to be any Internet? Are you going to be able to file? How do you get from point A to point B? Is it safe to get from point A to point B? There are a lot of minor and major particulars that you have to sort out before you get to a story. Like, can you drive the car? So I took driver’s ed twice. Once as a teenager to drive a regular car, and then as an adult to drive stick shift. I was never going to get behind the wheel of a rented car and have it be a stick shift that I couldn't drive. I was never going to let it happen to me again.
