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The Cuban-Salvadoran filmmaker Jorge Dalton published a strong critique on Facebook regarding the marches organized by the regime in support of Raúl Castro, where he described the slogan "Raúl is Raúl" -uttered by Miguel Díaz-Canel- as the "hollowest and most foolish thing invented these days," adding that "only a perfect fool could have come up with it."
The text directly responds to the event held on Friday, May 22, at the José Martí Anti-Imperialist Tribune in Havana, called by the Union of Communist Youth and other mass organizations following the criminal charges presented by the U.S. Department of Justice against the former president on May 20.
Dalton does not hold back in his harshness when referring to the accused: "Raúl may be very much Raúl, but he is a Raúl accused of murder, and that is something no one can take away from him, as this accusation is making headlines in the world's leading news outlets."
The federal charges, approved by a grand jury in the Southern District of Florida on April 23, accuse Castro of conspiracy to murder U.S. citizens and four counts of homicide for the deaths of four members of Hermanos al Rescate shot down on February 24, 1996 over international waters in the Florida Straits.
The filmmaker, son of the poet Roque Dalton and trained at the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry, ironically deconstructs the composition of the marches: "The majority of those attending come from various ministries, the Armed Forces, buses with plainclothes police, members of the Communist Party, increasingly bewildered youth, and members of the Young Communist Union, the Ministry of the Interior, Rapid Response Brigades, and everything that, in summary, constitutes the monumental and parasitic state sector that mostly produces nothing."
Dalton contrasts the neat appearance of the attendees—"well-dressed, clean caps, white, red, and light blue sweaters, nicely bathed, groomed, and well-pressed"—with the misery of the Cuban people, and notes that "many seem just to have come out of their air-conditioned spaces with adrenaline high, as high as their cynicism."
Mention explicitly the presence of Mariela Castro at the event and criticize figures of the regime such as Johana Tablada, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, and Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández Cossio, whom he describes as shopping for clothes in stores in New York, Madrid, Barcelona, and Mexico City: "They, to name just a few, are the ones on the side that has everything."
The filmmaker also highlights the notable absence of Black Cubans in the gatherings: "Black people continue to be the most marginalized and impoverished sector in this more than half a century of socialist dictatorship."
The event on Friday also had a grotesque note: Raúl Castro himself did not attend the event organized in his honor, which sparked a wave of ridicule on social media with phrases like "Wasn't the honoree supposed to be at his own event?" and "And Raúl in the cave!".
Leaked internal documents revealed that the Electric Company of Havana forcibly mobilized 971 workers from 41 units to attend the event, providing transportation starting at 5:00 am.
It was later reported that the regime is preparing open forums across the country from May 23 to June 3, amidst an electricity crisis with a record deficit exceeding 2,000 MW.
Dalton concludes his text with a scathing description of the Cubans who do not participate in those mobilizations: those who live "amid long lines to buy something worthless, among mountains of garbage, waiting for a water truck after 60 or 70 days without water, experiencing blackouts, without food, without medicine, hungry for everything and burdened with all kinds of accumulated sadness."
For them, the filmmaker writes, the answer is obvious: "They don't go to those marches."
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