14ymedio, Francis Matéo, Barcelona 13 July 2024 — “La Habana, Santa Clara, Holguín, Santiago, Palma Soriano, Camagüey, Las Tunas, Pinar del Río, Alquízar…”
Dianelys lists the cities through which the shock wave has spread since yesterday, caused by the first demonstration in San Antonio de los Baños, southwest of the Cuban capital. She is twenty years old, smiles and repeats the slogan that has been around the island for 24 hours, as the rallies progress:
Patria y vida! (Homeland and life!).
Homeland and life! Those are the words of the young that play to turn around the old revolutionary antiphon “homeland or death,” emptied of its meaning during the decades of Castro’s dictatorship and represented today by the sad look of President Miguel Díaz-Canel, a kind of “statue of the commander” sculpted in the Soviet way and placed at the head of the State by Raúl Castro, the last avatar of autocratic power. A president who has become the target of ridicule, who is called “singao”(motherfucker) in the joyful protest processions from Pinar del Río to Santiago de Cuba… as today in the streets of La Güinera, where Dianelys also uses the fashionable insult:
“Díaz-Canel, singao!”*
The adjective, typically Cuban, has become the title of a song and a refrain among the outraged; against an ambushed power.
Among the protesters of all ages in the popular neighborhood of La Güinera, few heard Miguel Díaz-Canel last night. Almost no one bothered to turn on the TV to pretend to listen to official speeches, as in Fidel Castro’s time. And very few care about the surveillance and the snitches’ reports, remotely controlled by the state police – in each block or building – to denounce the suspicious actions of their neighbors. This organization of theCommittees for the Defense of the Revolution, created in the regime’s early years based on the model of Robespierre’s general security committees, has now run aground on the rocks of scarcity. “All united,” as the national poet and liberator of the homeland José Martí said, but in the galley of hardship.
Almost no one bothers to turn on the TV to pretend to listen to official speeches, as in Fidel Castro’s time.
However, there are still a few stubborn people who defend the piece of bone that the Castro revolution has become and who try to make life even worse in their neighborhoods (in exchange for a measly compensation from the Party). These last defenders of a dying regime, which only has the brute force of its truncheon left to sustain itself, were loyal to the presidential speech in front of the TV set last night; they listened attentively to Miguel Díaz-Canel’s threats in response to the demonstrations that took place throughout the country that day. As usual, the president spoke in a crude wooden language and with a monotonous tone that leaves no room for feelings, let alone empathy:
“Unfortunately, I have to interrupt this Sunday to inform you that provocative elements have acted intending to promote the counterrevolution. They want to create incidents to justify our intervention. Let there be no doubt: they will have to pass over our dead bodies if they want to face the Revolution. That is why we call on all revolutionaries in the country, all communists, to take to the streets where these provocations take place. We will not allow anyone to manipulate and impose an annexationist plan. The order is this: revolutionaries, take to the streets!”
Dianelys did not hear Miguel Díaz-Canel’s call for confrontation. Since yesterday, she has been glued to her mobile phone, where she