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The Cuban regime staged yesterday, at the May Day event held in front of the United States Embassy in Havana, the symbolic handover of two books containing over 6.2 million signatures from the campaign "My Signature for the Homeland" to Raúl Castro and President Miguel Díaz-Canel.
The official account of the Presidency of Cuba announced that "6,230,973 Cubans expressed their will" in the campaign, presented as a spontaneous initiative from civil society but organized and centrally directed by the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), according to analysts and opponents who described the event as a propaganda operation in response to maximum pressure from Washington.
The figure, however, does not withstand scrutiny: with a population that does not exceed 11 million inhabitants —including children and the elderly— the 6.23 million signatures would represent more than 56% of all Cubans, a proportion that critics deem impossible without documented mass coercion in workplaces, schools, and CDR.
Testimonials collected in Matanzas confirm this unambiguously: "Signing is mandatory in workplaces; if you don't sign, you already know, you're out."
Executives of state-owned companies were compelled to secure at least 80% of signatures from their employees under the threat of dismissal, and the pressure extended to warehouses, hospitals, universities, and through the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.
Despite this, there was resistance: the viral poem "No Firmo" by José Martínez, the call from opposition leader José Daniel Ferrer García (UNPACU) not to participate, and documented cases of Cubans who stood firm in front of their CDRs and refused to sign with a simple argument: "My dignity cannot be signed."
The event coincided exactly with Donald Trump's signing of a new executive order that dramatically expands sanctions against the regime, including secondary sanctions on foreign financial entities that trade with Havana, as part of a pressure campaign that has imposed more than 240 new sanctions since January 2026 and intercepted at least seven oil tankers bound for Cuba, reducing energy imports by 80-90%.
The result is an island experiencing blackouts of up to 25 hours a day in over 55% of its territory and a projected GDP contraction of 7.2% for 2026.
In that context of crisis, the appearance of Raúl Castro, aged 94, was the first in five months: Díaz-Canel himself had described him in April as "alive but withdrawn for health reasons" and "fragile due to age," and the general had even been absent from the 9th Congress of the PCC held in March.
The images from the event show a visibly deteriorated Raúl Castro holding one of the guest books; in the document, the first visible signature is that of Raúl Castro Ruz, followed by Díaz-Canel, Roberto Morales Ojeda, and Salvador Valdés Mesa, indicating that the regime leaders topped the list of a campaign they presented as a civic initiative.
The image operation didn’t stop there: this Saturday, Díaz-Canel's digital communication advisor, Leticia Martínez Hernández, published an album on Facebook titled "Raúl with our signatures" featuring Photoshop-edited photos to conceal the general's physical deterioration, which was reported by journalist Mario J. Pentón who compared the original images with the edited ones.
The campaign "My Signature for the Homeland" was launched on April 19, coinciding with the 65th anniversary of the Battle of Playa Girón, in support of the declaration "Girón is today and always," in which the regime asserted that "Cuba will not be a star" — a reference to a possible annexation to the United States.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, went so far as to claim that 81% of the population had signed the letter repudiating the embargo, the "energy blockade," and the "threats of war," a figure that, if true, would imply that virtually every adult Cuban in the country signed under pressure or without a real alternative.
On March 30, Trump summarized his outlook on the regime with a straightforward statement: "Cuba will fail in a short time," and the United States "will be there to help."
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