Miguel Díaz-Canel resorted this Wednesday to a rhetoric laden with revolutionary grandiloquence to congratulate Raúl Castro on his 95th birthday.
In a birthday message posted this morning on X, Díaz-Canel compiled titles and epithets to describe Raúl Castro. He referred to him as a "loving son," "loyal brother," "fearless fighter," "original leader," and "guardian of the essences."
He also asserted that Raúl is a "truly Cuban Cuban, with all the strength that such redundancy implies."
Díaz-Canel went further in his praise, writing that reaching 95 years "with one foot in the stirrup and an endless record of service to the Motherland, to regional and global peace, to multilateralism, and to the dreams of social justice for millions of human beings, is not his fortune," but that of the Cubans.
The message concluded with a veiled reference to the criminal charges against Castro in the United States.
"His long life is the triumph of the love he has given to his people and that today his people return to him. No hatred will ever prevail against that shield of deep affection," said Díaz-Canel.
It refers to the federal criminal charge against Raúl Castro approved by a grand jury in the Southern District of Florida on April 23, 2026, for the shooting down of two civilian aircraft from Brothers to the Rescue in 1996, which resulted in the deaths of four Cuban Americans.
The charges include conspiracy to murder U.S. citizens, destruction of aircraft, and four individual counts of murder, offenses that carry the death penalty or life imprisonment.
The centerpiece of that accusation is an audio recording in which Castro himself orders: "Throw them into the sea when they appear, and do not consult those who have the authority."
The Secretary of State Marco Rubio was straightforward in his assessment of the birthday celebrant: "Castro is a fugitive from U.S. justice."
Granma celebrates the Army General
The official newspaper Granma joined the campaign with the same propagandistic fervor as Díaz-Canel. The article "Raúl, throughout his revolutionary life," signed by the deputy director of the Office of Historical Affairs, reviews passages from the Selected Works of the dictator.
On June 2, Granma covered the presentation in Holguín of that printed collection. It consists of nine volumes with over 500 documents and more than 5,000 pages dedicated to glorifying the figure of Raúl Castro.
All this legitimization campaign occurs while Havana woke up this Wednesday with pot banging and protests in El Vedado, Centro Habana, Playa, Regla, Habana Vieja, Cayo Hueso, and San Miguel del Padrón, many of which were motivated by power outages lasting up to three consecutive days.
The contrast is hard to ignore. Díaz-Canel speaks of a "shield of deep affection," while Cubans bang pots and pans in the darkness on the birthday of the "guardian of essences."
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