The Cuban singer Haydée Milanés stated that thearrest of the young content creators known as El4tico is “yet another proof of the horror” of the Cuban regime.
“Yesterday, these two young Cubans were detained, merely for expressing their thoughts. The world should know that in #Cuba, different thinking is cruelly pursued and punished. This is not new; it is yet another testament to the horror we Cubans live under. Below, I share the message left by Kamil, anticipating this detention,” wrote Milanés on Facebook.
The artist refers to a letter written by the activist Kamil Zayas Pérez, a member of the independent project, who was detained on Friday in Holguín along with Ernesto Ricardo Medina during a police operation.
In his statement, shared by activists and dated January 2026, Kamil calmly warned with prophetic insight: “If you are seeing or reading this, it is because they finally found a way to lock me up, to try to put a temporary gag on me.”
The activist explained that his arrest was not due to any common crime, but rather to “the only crime that a dictatorship cannot tolerate: daring to look straight ahead and say out loud what we all notice: its glaring faults, its chronic inefficiencies, its systemic injustices, and the oppression that crushes the dignity of an entire people.”
Zayas, known for his reflective tone and analytical skills, stated that his work at El4tico has always aimed to promote critical thinking "without hate and without polarization." "I have only pointed out what is incorrect, humiliating, and degrading to the human being. And that, it seems, is unforgivable," he wrote.
In the letter, the young man denounced that the Cuban state, in the face of the deepest crisis in its recent history, "chooses to tighten the screws even further, to close the narrative until it suffocates it, and to increase the level of repression." He also described the fear of power as its main driving force: "They fear more taking responsibility for their own mistakes than dragging an entire people into the abyss out of pride and arrogance."
Zayas also reflected on the hypocrisy of the official discourse, which exalts rebellion in history books while persecuting those who practice it today: “They silence those of us who do exactly what they teach: raising our voices against injustice. Those are their heroes, until someone truly imitates them.”
In one of the most moving passages, the young man defined himself without grandiosity: “I am nobody special, neither a leader nor indispensable. I am just another Cuban, a small part in a vast cause: the desire to live with dignity and to speak the truth without fear.”
The letter concluded with a message of hope and challenge: “Silencing me does not silence the tide. A cell does not extinguish a collective consciousness that has already awakened. Forced silence fixes nothing; it only festers the wound further. The Cuban people no longer settle for scraps or stories. They deserve — they demand — something much better.”
The text has gone viral under the hashtag #TodosSomosEl4tico, generating reactions of solidarity both inside and outside of Cuba.
Amid power outages, censorship, and a growing wave of uncertainty and outrage, Kamil Zayas's letter encapsulates the spirit of a generation that confronts fear with words. A message that, although written from the foresight of confinement, already belongs to the collective memory of a country that — as he wrote — “demands something much better.”
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