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The official troubadour Raúl Torres published this Sunday a lengthy post on Facebook titled "Cuba, in the Eye of the Storm," in which he displays a fiery martial lyricism—with alligators, war drums, mythological animals, and silent missiles—to warn the "man of the North" that "the heart of the empire will also bleed." An epic poem and meticulous exercise in revolutionary grandiosity. And, as is often the case with Torres, perfectly disconnected from the reality that the Cuban people live.
The trigger for the poetic outburst was the statement by Trump this Friday during a private dinner at the Forum Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, where the U.S. president claimed that, after concluding military operations in Iran, he would send the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier to within 100 yards of the Cuban coast so that the regime would say, "Thank you very much, we surrender."
Torres quickly picked up the keyboard and dove into the fray with all the metaphorical artillery at his disposal. "The drums of an aircraft carrier, announced 100 yards from our seawall, are not party drums, buddy. They are the roll of a funeral march announced for sanity," wrote the troubadour, who never misses an opportunity to turn a geopolitical crisis—or any death—into a "protest song."
In his text, Torres describes Trump with "the senile coldness that characterizes him" and asserts that Washington has spent over sixty years failing to decipher "the mystery of our psyche." The Cuban proclaims with overflowing epicness, "when he feels cornered, he does not flee. He transforms." What a powerful image. It's a pity that 93% of the Cubans who remain on the island declare that they would emigrate if they could.
The troubadour reaches the climax of his speech when he notes that Cuba would be "a silent missile without radar to detect it, heading straight for the heart of the United States," and that "if Havana explodes, the shrapnel... the contained fury of an entire island will cross the Florida Strait faster than any rocket." Ninety miles of water, Torres recalls with a hint of geographic disdain, "is truly just a puddle." Poetic. Intimidating. And completely alien to the Cuba where 89% of families live in extreme poverty.
While Torres evokes an invincible people that transforms their anguish into resistance, power outages in several Cuban provinces exceed 20 hours a day, 25% of Cubans go to bed without dinner, and 29% of families have eliminated one daily meal. But of course, that doesn't rhyme as well as "cornered animal."
It is not the first time that Torres has starred in an episode of revolutionary epic that ends up as a meme. Last March, he climbed onto a tank of the Ministry of the Armed Forces to pose with a martial attitude in what the Tank Division described as a union between "art and defense," generating a wave of mockery. His record also includes "Patria o Muerte por la Vida" (2021), an official response to the opposition anthem "Patria y Vida," which accumulated more than 48,000 dislikes on YouTube and was labeled by Google as the worst song of that year.
Meanwhile, Miguel Díaz-Canel responded on Friday that "no aggressor will bend Cuba," and Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla mocked quoting Trump's words. Torres, staying true to his role as the regime's organic artist, joined the chorus with his usual grandiloquence. The U.S. pressure has amassed more than 240 sanctions since January 2025 and an energy embargo that has reduced Cuban oil imports by 80% to 90%.
The troubadour concludes his post with a phrase that perfectly summarizes the spirit of the text: “We do not want compassion, we want respect. We do not want alms, we want peace.” Noble words. The problem is that Díaz-Canel himself acknowledged this week that Cubans will “eat” only “if we are capable of producing,” which suggests that the regime to which Torres dedicates his verses has failed for decades to address even the most basic issues. In fact, 80% of Cubans believe the current crisis is worse than the Special Period of the 1990s.
But Torres has drums to play and alligators to turn into missiles.
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