A Cuban confronted the president of his Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) face-to-face and publicly refused to sign the "My Signature for the Homeland" campaign launched by the regime on April 19.
The man shared a video that is circulating on social media and summarizes the frustration of a growing segment of the population.
In the recording, he is seen calmly yet firmly explaining the reasons for his refusal, and he pointed directly to a trash heap piled up next to a primary school and a secondary school to illustrate his argument: "Look at that trash heap, that is a primary school and this is a secondary school. Look at this disrespect. This is how they treat us."
"I am not going to sign for one simple reason. Because the Cuban government is not currently concerned about this beautiful people," declared the citizen to the president of the CDR, who had approached him to ask for his signature.
The man clarified that he does not oppose peace—"I want peace, like almost all Cubans do"—but he rejected the campaign because the regime does not fulfill its basic responsibilities to the population.
His final words were blunt: "This is how they have us, in this mess, which is why there are so many diseases and they want the people of this country to defend this revolution; it's no longer a revolution because they're all thieves."
The campaign "My Signature for the Homeland" was introduced by the Communist Party as a "spontaneous" movement of civil society to support the Revolutionary Government's Statement "Giron is today and always."
Miguel Díaz-Canel was the first to sign, on April 20, at the Ciénaga de Zapata Memorial Museum in Matanzas, with the official goal of collecting millions of signatures before May 1.
The guestbooks were opened in communities, workplaces, universities, and through the CDR, neighborhood watch organizations that the regime uses as its main tool for community pressure.
Independent analysts and Cubans on social media responded harshly to the initiative: "My signature is not to support dictatorships" and "When will we have signatures for free elections?" were some of the phrases that circulated.
Others questioned the very logic of the campaign: "Does the signature bring light? Or water? Does it bring food? Does the misery end with the signature?"
The rejection was not only individual. Residents of Block 4 in Cárdenas, Matanzas, collectively refused to sign despite pressures and threats from envoys of the regime.
The deterioration of Cuban schools that the citizen reported in the video is not an isolated case. In February, authorities from San Miguel del Padrón ordered to dump garbage in front of a pre-university in Havana, creating breeding grounds for mosquitoes, rodents, and diseases.
In March, the Mixta Victoria de Girón School in Nuevitas, Camagüey - inaugurated in 1979 as the largest primary school in Latin America - was found in a state of total abandonment.
The campaign is being launched in the context of a severe economic crisis: Díaz-Canel himself acknowledged on April 16 that "there is absolutely no fuel for almost everything," while independent analysts estimate that the contraction of the Cuban GDP has reached 23% since 2019.
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