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Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz dedicated a birthday message to President Miguel Díaz-Canel on X this Monday, with a phrase that, in the midst of the worst crisis Cuba has faced in decades, sounds more like an epitaph than a celebration: No matter how tough the times are: We will overcome!
Díaz-Canel turns 66 years old today, born on April 20, 1960, in Placetas, Villa Clara, and has been in power since October 2019, when he succeeded Raúl Castro as president, a position he also took on as the First Secretary of the Communist Party in 2021.
Marrero's greeting, accompanied by a photograph of Canel embracing a Cuban woman, inadvertently captures the state of the regime: the historic slogan of the Revolution since 1959, now invoked as Cubans cook with charcoal and firewood due to a shortage of electricity and gas.
The contrast between rhetoric and reality could not be more striking. Just four days earlier, Díaz-Canel himself publicly acknowledged, at an event in Vedado, that Cuba absolutely lacks fuel for nearly everything.
The National Electric System experienced three complete collapses in March 2026 alone, the longest lasting 29 hours and 29 minutes, with deficits reaching 1,945 megawatts, affecting 55% of the territory and leaving more than 200,000 residents of Havana without water.
The immediate cause of the energy debacle is the interruption of Venezuelan oil supply —between 25,000 and 35,000 barrels per day— following the capture of Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026, alongside the suspension of Mexican shipments on January 29 due to Executive Order 14380 from the Trump administration.
Cuba produces only 40,000 of the 110,000 daily barrels it needs, and the economy has experienced a 23% decline since 2019, while the country has lost over 10% of its population in four years due to massive emigration.
Marrero, who has been prime minister since December 2019, is not unfamiliar with the contradictions in the official discourse. In January 2026, he invoked a "war economy" comparable to the Special Period of the 90s, and in March he warned that if the regime's apparatus treats the economic program as just a mere document, "we have lost the fight."
The day before his birthday, on April 19, Díaz-Canel proclaimed before veterans at the Palace of the Revolution that "we will always overcome," during a two-hour event commemorating the centenary of Fidel Castro's birth.
On the eve of this Monday, his 66th birthday, he spent the day presiding over the ceremony for the 65th anniversary of Playa Girón in Ciénaga de Zapata, Matanzas, where he inaugurated the campaign "My Signature for the Homeland."
The popular reaction on social media to these official acts was less solemn. In response to the references to the "achievements" of the Revolution, many Cubans reacted directly: What achievements? The one about coal?
In 2021, Cuban artists launched "Patria y Vida" as a counter-slogan to the historic "¡Patria o Muerte, Venceremos!", reversing the message of sacrifice into one of dignity and survival, a reflection of the accumulated fatigue after decades of unfulfilled promises that Marrero's greeting, in 2026, accurately illustrates once again.
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