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The Cuban comedian and actor Ulises Toirac posted a scathing message on Facebook this Saturday titled "The situation is dire", in which he critically dismantles, with sharp humor and genuine outrage, the logic of the Cuban regime: spending the budget on mobilizations and propaganda activities while the country is falling apart amidst garbage and blackouts lasting over 20 hours a day.
The text arrives a day after the May Day marches, when the regime mobilized thousands of people —half a million in Havana, according to the grandiose official figures— led by Raúl Castro and Miguel Díaz-Canel, along with more than 600 international union representatives as guests, under the slogan "The homeland is defended."
"We have reached limits that even by bringing together Salvador Dalí, Albert Camus, and Luis Buñuel cannot be achieved," writes Toirac, invoking the three great masters of surrealism and absurdity to describe a reality that surpasses them all.
The main target of his criticism is the obscene gap between spectacle and reality: "A government that prioritizes mobilizations and signatures and interviews and... (which all require funding) before eradicating garbage dumps or litigating energy solutions that don’t require waiting [...] until 2050," he writes, with the irony of someone who has been watching the same circus for far too long.
This propaganda campaign includes the "My Signature for the Homeland", presented as an "spontaneous initiative of civil society" but directed by the Communist Party of Cuba, which collected 6,230,973 signatures as of May 1, according to official figures.
The package also includes Díaz-Canel's interview with NBC News, where the leader denied the existence of political prisoners, blamed the U.S. embargo for the energy crisis, and stated that "resignation is not in his vocabulary." Toirac had already responded to that interview at the time and criticized the wastefulness of the homage event to the declaration of the socialist character of the revolution led by Díaz-Canel on 23 and 12, during a severe blackout crisis.
While the regime signs declarations and organizes parades, Cuba faces daily energy deficits ranging from 1,200 to 1,800 MW, with blackouts lasting over 20 hours a day that have not ceased since the beginning of the year. The National Electric System completely collapsed on two occasions in March. The economy has contracted by 23% since 2019. And 1.25 million Cubans emigrated between 2021 and 2024, in what is already being labeled as the worst migration tragedy in the history of the Island.
Toirac does not limit himself to criticizing the government. He also addresses the phenomenon of the proliferation of opposition parties in exile —just days earlier, he had humorously launched his own "Orthodontic Bembocratic Party" — and warns that "there is a long way to go before the announced parties [...] become functional."
The comedian also makes it clear that his criticism of the regime's stagnation does not imply endorsing foreign intervention or annexation: "I do not want interventions or annexations. The term 'patriot' applies to those who want their homeland to be sovereign, whether you like it or not. The other is just handless masturbation."
But patience has its limits. Toirac describes a country where the pot-banging protests over blackouts in La Güinera ended in 14 arrests, where the regime organizes revolutionary reaffirmation events in response to the protests, and where "the paralysis that kills has already passed ten stops" while he continues to see Julio Iglesias singing "La vida sigue igual."
"It seems that absurdity is the national sport and the ostrich is the bird that best identifies us as a nation," concludes Toirac, with an image that accurately summarizes what 67 years of communist dictatorship has built: a nation with its head buried while the world—and its own people—slips through its fingers.
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