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Lis Cuesta Peraza, wife of the Cuban ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel, is making headlines again, not for any achievements as is commonly the case, but for her insistence on presenting herself as a “cultural worker.”
In her most recent message on X (formerly Twitter), also known as the 'non-first lady', she wrote: "Congratulations, sisters and brothers in cause and activism. Culture is the Homeland, and working to defend it is to make Revolution. Special honor to the Poet of the Centennial Generation."
The message, laden with the usual jargon of the regime, once again highlights the deep confusion between the so-called "continuity" of culture and propaganda, between creation and obedience.
Cuesta Peraza congratulated the workers in the cultural sector as if speaking from an ideological trench, echoing the empty rhetoric of official speeches, where the word "Homeland" is used as an excuse to justify repression, control, and mediocrity.
Nothing in her background supports that self-proclamation as an art worker or cultural promoter. Her name does not appear in relevant creative projects or teaching programs, except that her "Pedagogical Model for the Export of Academic Services in the Paradiso Agency" might be a doctoral thesis worthy of her masterful dissertations on reggaeton.
Cuesta Peraza is neither an artist nor an academic: she is a recycled protocol officer, turned into the female face of the misogynistic ideological apparatus. Her arrival at the Higher Institute of Art (ISA) has been denounced as a political placement. She was not chosen for her talent, but for her closeness to the power structure.
Her true career is tied to organizing events, food festivals, and official trips where she mingles with the regime's elite, amidst drinks and banquets, while the country she claims to represent bleeds from long lines, blackouts, and hunger.
His speech is the antithesis of culture. While independent creators are harassed, censored, or forced into exile, Cuesta Peraza allows himself to speak of "defending the Revolution" as if that defense had not been precisely the cause of the cultural suffocation that Cuba has been suffering for over six decades.
Every word of yours — "cause," "militancy," "revolution" — is an echo soaked in the ethanol of the worn-out propaganda machinery, an insult to the true artists who risk their freedom to express themselves beyond the limits imposed by power.
There is not a single reference in her message to art, to creation, to freedom of thought, or to the right to dissent. Just slogans. Just the old slogan that reduces culture to political obedience. That vision does not build a homeland, as she proclaims; it destroys it, because it turns art into an instrument of indoctrination and critical thinking into a crime.
Meanwhile, Cuesta Peraza continues to embody what most Cubans despise: the arrogance of power disguised as virtue. His public appearances are trivial and inconsequential, and his trips are opportunities to compose odes to superficiality and showcase privileges, rather than to represent national culture.
Perhaps it is time for Cuesta Peraza to stop speaking on behalf of culture and limit himself to what he does best: organizing banquets, posing for cameras, and pretending to hold an institutional role that he does not possess, but which grants him access to Conviasa or Plus Ultra on his trips to Beijing or New York.
Because if culture is the homeland, as she says, then her homeland is the Swedish table, the gourmet festival, the sewers of San Remo, and the boutiques of Cartier.
The true workers of Cuban culture are elsewhere: in underfunded schools, in banned community projects, in closed venues, in exile and internal exile, in censored screens, in galleries and books that disturb State Security, in that whole Island where “the impetuous wave invades the vast hall of kneelings.”
They do not need slogans or honorary titles. Only freedom. While the independent artistic sector faces censorship, surveillance, and poverty, Cuesta Peraza, on the other hand, continues to confuse the whimper of a pamphlet with the voice of a country that does not hear her and hates her.
From her and the rulers of the regime, Raúl Gómez García would say: “They are the same”… donkeys with claws.
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