Marxlenin Pérez Valdés, host of the government program 'Cuadrando la Caja' and wife of Fidel Castro Smirnov—the grandson of the dictator Fidel Castro—posted a text on Facebook this Sunday, defending the speech on alleged economic reforms by Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Under the title "Expectations," the spokesperson for the regime referred to the umpteenth maneuver by Dr. Díaz-Canel last Friday on state television, during which he appeared flustered while once again discussing the old pieces of the political domino game of the dictatorship: economic management system, municipal autonomy, business autonomy, agricultural recovery, foreign trade, and foreign investment.
Although in a disparaging tone, the academic acknowledged in her text the plurality of opinions among Cubans, only to immediately deny it with the official dogma of unity.
The text is revealing in what it unintentionally admits: Pérez Valdés acknowledged that in Cuban society there are "expectations, many, all expressed in different languages and from different starting points: ideological, classist, political, and economic." But then, he quoted the designated leader to conclude the debate: "our response must be one of unity".
This formula —to accept plurality in order to subordinate it to the Party's mandate— is characteristic of the totalitarian essence of the Cuban regime, which instrumentalizes "unity" not as a democratic value but as a tool for social control.
Pérez Valdés herself admitted, in passing, that what Díaz-Canel announced "was just a rough outline of what we should know in more detail soon," which did not stop her from launching into a lengthy diatribe against those who reacted with skepticism or criticism.
In her post, the defender of Castroism classified critics into a gallery of disparaging categories: "mercenaries," "theorists without work," spreaders of "neoliberal and treasonous agendas of their masters through their counter-revolutionary media," and those "who use this crossroads to see if they can discredit the president."
The only group that deserves the label of "legitimate," according to Pérez Valdés, is that of those who care about the future of socialism and "will not stand idly by at the possibility of losing our social justice project originally designed for the most humble."
He also acknowledged, seemingly unaware of the irony, that "in real life, people have more urgent matters to attend to", referring to Cubans who do not participate in Facebook debates.
That "real life" is in a country where 89% of families live in extreme poverty, power outages reach between 20 and 40 hours daily in some areas, the year-on-year inflation was 13.42% in March 2026, and more than one and a half million Cubans emigrated between 2020 and 2024.
The reforms that Pérez Valdés advocates for —greater autonomy for state enterprises, unblocking small and medium private businesses, and eliminating intermediaries in foreign trade— were described as a "faded trick" by economist Pedro Monreal and as "too late, very poorly executed, and insufficient" by other analysts. They still need to be approved by the Political Bureau and the National Assembly, which are scheduled for July.
This is not the first time Pérez Valdés has been involved in episodes of this nature. In December 2025, she called "gusanos" those who criticized on social media a suggestion made in her own program to refrain from eating rice or potatoes.
In March 2026, during a tour of 18 cities in Spain, Pérez Valdés stated that private businesses in Cuba “we will create them only to eliminate them”, a phrase that precisely encapsulates the regime's stance towards any real economic openness.
The Cuban Constitution of 2019 legally enshrines this logic in its Article 5 by declaring the Communist Party of Cuba as the "highest leading force" and prohibiting any political alternatives, turning the dogma of unity into law.
The comments on Pérez Valdés's post were not exactly enthusiastic: "Developing awareness? At this point and with an empty stomach?" wrote one Internet user; another was more succinct: "I'll read it when I want to sleep and there's no light"; a third added: "No text that uses the word 'agglutinate' has ever said anything serious."
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