Cuban artist Julio Lorente, based in Jacksonville, Florida, offered a stark analysis of the situation faced by the Cuban people under the Castro regime during an interview with CiberCuba, summed up in a powerful phrase: "To resist is to live like a savage, and the Cuban has adapted to that."
Lorente, a graduate of the Higher Institute of Art (ISA) in Havana and known for his critical work against the regime's iconography, believes that "the anthropological damage to Cubans is manifested in their ability to resist. The act of resisting has already lost its heroic notoriety and now exists in its purest anthropological expression," the artist stated.
For Lorente, the image that best illustrates this degradation is that of Cubans cooking with charcoal inside their apartments, something that Díaz-Canel himself acknowledged as a necessity by requesting the provision of materials for cooking, from charcoal to firewood.
The visual artist also noted that popular resistance has repeatedly faced a wall of impunity that creates what he calls "historical frustration": "Playing a cacophony of pots and pans for ten days and nothing happens. Burning the headquarters of the party (PCC) in Morón and nothing happens."
That helplessness, according to Lorente, results in a collective paralysis that the regime exploits to sustain itself: "Nothing is going to change. They are going to stay there. Why should I do anything? They give this one twenty years, they give that one thirty years, the exiles keep up the rhetoric, Trump is still in Iran, and I'm the one getting the hits."
In his opinion, this "results in a collective indifference that the regime capitalizes on perpetually."
The historical contrast outlined by Lorente is striking: Cuba was the first country in Latin America to have color television, it had the first railway in the region, and it was a pioneer in radio broadcasts. Today, however, it ranks below Haiti in global wealth indicators.
"It is regrettable. This indicates and demonstrates how flawed communism is as a political theory and social practice for those romantics who continue to bet on that garbage of an ideology," he stated.
As a solution, Julio Lorente proposes a "preventive intervention" to dismantle the regime, followed by a monitored investment from the United States and a reconstruction plan similar to the post-war European Marshall Plan, which would allow for the rebuilding of a country that, in his words, "is in a state that seems as if a nuclear bomb went off here."
Since March 6, 2026, at least 156 protests have been recorded in multiple Cuban provinces, including the burning of the Communist Party headquarters in Morón on March 14, with none resulting in any political change.
"Cuba must go down in history as a case study for universities on the disaster that the unquestionable permanence of a communist party in the life of a nation represents," concluded Lorente.
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