The National Capitol of Havana became the stage for a political paradox that is hard to ignore this Saturday, as the Cuban regime chose the chamber of the former Senate of the Republic to hold the Parliamentary Public Hearing "Cuba Wants Peace," the same space that for over six decades it has sought to erase from collective memory as a symbol of a "corrupt and bourgeois" past.
From that chamber, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Josefina Vidal Ferreiro declared that "the aggression against Cuba is not yet to be realized. It is not the danger of a possible future, but an act that is already in full execution."
Regarding this, the analyst Oscar Visiedo succinctly captured the paradox on his Facebook profile in precise terms. "When a decrepit revolutionary narrative can no longer produce legitimacy, power seeks to appropriate the solemnity of the republican symbols it once tried to erase. But symbols have their own memory. Sometimes power thinks it is using a building. Yet, it is the building that ultimately morally defeats power."
Visiedo concluded his analysis with a projection about the building itself. "Its imposing doors will soon open to welcome the multiparty legislators who will represent a diversity of thoughts and projects," a phrase that points to what the Capitol was conceived to be—and which the regime, by using it as a backdrop of power, inadvertently recalls.
The contradiction is structural. The revolutionary narrative built its legitimacy over decades on the systematic delegitimization of the Republic (1902-1958), portraying it as a period of dependency, corruption, and historical failure.
After 1959, the new government dissolved the bicameral Congress - Senate and House of Representatives - and the Capitolio, inaugurated on May 20, 1929, as the seat of the legislative power, was emptied of its original function and spent decades in decline.
The regime was never able to demolish it or erase it from the national memory. Starting in 2010, its restoration began; the golden dome was returned in August 2019 at a cost of 9.6 million dollars, with the support of Russian specialists.
The building was converted into the headquarters of the National Assembly of People's Power, the unicameral parliament of the single-party system.
The Senate chamber, where Vidal spoke, evokes plural representation, debate, the Constitution, and citizenship—exactly what the regime has eliminated. There is no Senate, no political pluralism, and no functioning representative Republic there.
Este no es un episodio aislado. In February 2025, the Capitol was the setting for the luxurious Habano Festival, con élites comunistas y millonarios extranjeros, mientras más del 50 % de Cuba sufría apagones.
The singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez then denounced "the gradual disappearance of the sense of national dignity" and the trivialization of historical memory embodied in the building.
In this regard, Leticia Martínez, the head of communication for the ruling Miguel Díaz-Canel responded defending the event with official rhetoric.
The immediate context of the hearing at the National Capitol is the highest escalation of tension between Cuba and Washington in decades, with over 240 sanctions since January 2026, a decline of between 80% and 90% in energy imports, and blackouts exceeding 24 continuous hours in several locations.
This is complemented by Executive Order 14404 from President Donald Trump, signed on May 1, which expanded secondary sanctions against the Cuban military elite conglomerate GAESA and set June 5 as the deadline for foreign companies to sever ties with Cuban entities.
Vidal also described the criminal charges filed on May 20 against Raúl Castro for the downing of two planes from Brothers to the Rescue in 1996, which resulted in the deaths of four Cuban-Americans, as a "crude and fraudulent accusation," and warned that "the danger of military aggression against Cuba grows every day."
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