The president recorded “From the Presidency” with a group of Americans “interested in knowing the Cuban reality”
14ymedio, Madrid, 12 June 2024 — Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel met for the most recent edition of his TV program Desde la Presidencia with a group of “young Americans interested in learning about the Cuban reality.”
The audience of about a hundred people was already instructed.
These were the members of Let Cuba Live, a group adhering to the pro-Castro organization The People’s Forum and co-directed by Manolo de los Santos, who acted as moderator of a meeting in which the past and present of the Island were discussed, with the “intensified blockade” as a backdrop, along with Palestine and, above all, the example of democracy that is Cuba.
“There is a virtual Cuba, on social media, and there is another real Cuba, which is the one you can see. And we have shortages, we have problems, we have limitations but there are no missing people here, there are no murders here. This country is more democratic than the United States,” said the Cuban leader with conviction. The phrase was part of an extensive segment dedicated to exposing his point of view on how capitalism has proven not to work if it does not apply social justice as, he argued, is done on the Island.
“They say we’re not democratic because we have only one party. But what about the United States, is it democratic because it has two parties? One party, the Republicans, applied the 243 measures to strengthen the blockade, and another party, the Democrats, maintained the blockade’s measures,” he summarized. What’s up with that? Is democracy measured by the number of parties or is democracy measured, really, by how people can exercise their rights in a society?”
“They say we’re not democratic because we have only one party. But what about the United States, is it democratic because it has two parties?”
The president wanted to give examples of the inequality of rich countries regardless of the flaws in his speech. “When we go fetch food, we go fetch food for 11 million Cubans. It is not putting food in the store windows and letting those who can afford it buy it, and letting those who cannot afford it starve,” he reflected, although on the Island that is already the constant reality, as a result of the absence of products in the rationed market, sales in freely convertible currency and skyrocketing inflation, among other factors.
Much of the meeting, and