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A post by the Cuban poet and improvisational artist Alexis Díaz-Pimienta regarding the capture of President Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces early Saturday morning has sparked significant controversy, as he denounced the action as an invasion and warned that Cuba could be the next target.
The narrator also reacted on Facebook with a message of alarm and condemnation regarding the military operation by the United States that resulted in the capture of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who were transferred to New York to face federal charges for alleged links to drug trafficking.
In his post, he stated that "what we feared has just happened," describing the action as an invasion and expressing concern about Cuban voices that celebrate the event and predict that "next will be Cuba."
To accompany his reflection, Díaz-Pimienta shared the poem "Reflexiones bajo alarma aérea," written in 1990 and published in his book "Los actuales habitantes de Cipango."
The text, originally conceived in Havana, has now been presented as applicable to Caracas and as a warning about the human cost of war, beyond political rhetoric.
The author's positioning generated a wave of divided comments. Some users supported his outright rejection of war, intervention, and invasions, advocating for the principle that each people should determine their own destiny without foreign interference and warning about the danger of normalizing violence as a political solution.
However, a significant part of the reactions was openly critical. Numerous commentators questioned the condemnation of military action without offering a viable alternative for peoples subjected to totalitarian regimes, pointing out that in contexts such as Venezuela or Cuba, civic and democratic paths have been closed by repression.
Many insisted that demanding an unarmed and impoverished population to overthrow a dictatorship on their own is equivalent to a moral position disconnected from reality.
Other criticisms pointed directly at Díaz-Pimienta for not speaking out with equal emphasis on political prisoners, repression, electoral fraud, or humanitarian crises in Cuba and Venezuela.
Some accused him of talking "from a distance" and demanded consistency between his humanitarian sensitivity and his silence in the face of abuses by authoritarian regimes.
There were also comments that recontextualized the concept of war, pointing out that the U.S. operation aimed to capture Maduro and was not directed against the civilian population, and that the real prolonged violence has been perpetrated for years by dictatorships against their own people.
The exchange once again brought to the forefront a recurring dilemma in contemporary Cuban discourse: the tension between the ethical rejection of war and the pragmatism of those who believe that certain regimes can only be brought down through external force.
A discussion that, as happened with similar reactions from other intellectuals, inevitably shifted to the Cuban case.
For example, the writer Jorge Fernández Era described the military operation as a terrorist act and questioned the legitimacy of capturing Maduro simply because he is a dictator, insisting that Venezuela's issues should be resolved by the Venezuelans themselves.
Similarly, the comedian Ulises Toirac reacted with irony to the geopolitical arguments put forth by Trump, reducing them to oil interests and the logic of military intervention, a perspective that reinforced the view that the operation is driven more by Washington's strategic interests than by a universal principle of defending democracy.
In all cases, these opinions sparked a wave of critical responses, many of them from exile, highlighting the practical impossibility of overthrowing an armed and repressive regime without external support.
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