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The Cuban actor Luis Alberto García Novoa posted a powerful message this Tuesday on his Facebook profile directed at Cuban leaders, demanding that they endure the same hardships as the people: hunger, blackouts, lack of medicine, and ridiculous salaries.
"I want to see you starving, with those guayaberas and uniforms 'soaked' in sweat, unable to sleep, without medicine, doing everything on foot, lacking money to solve anything. Suffering just like those below," wrote the well-known performer in the post.
The text begins by quoting a line from the Bayamo Anthem —the national anthem of Cuba— with which García Novoa claims to be "in full agreement," but he turns it against the leadership itself: "Let it be clear 'up there' that suffering these literal and emotional blackouts, evidently unsolvable due to your lack of foresight and poor management... IS ALSO! It is also to live in shame and disgrace, SUNKEN!"
The actor lists one by one the calamities that define everyday life in Cuba: salaries that "make one laugh," food shortages, spoiled meals due to lack of refrigeration, garbage dumps, sewage, absence of drinking water and gas for cooking, building collapses, inadequate transportation, neglect of the elderly, soaring prices, violence, crime, corruption, and police repression against those who exercise "their inalienable right to complain."
One of the most straightforward passages of the message is the explicit rejection of the official narrative concerning the embargo: “Enough of wielding the thesis that the U.S. blockade/embargo is the ONLY CULPRIT for this hell in which we burn.”
García Novoa also challenges the leaders to publicly account for their own responsibilities: "Aren't you going to acknowledge your glaring errors accumulated over decades? There's plenty to share. What about your shortcomings? Your failed experiments? Your poor bets? Your unparalleled obstinacy? Your 'switches from stick to rumba'? So many measures that don't measure anything?"
The actor concludes the text with a line that turns vulnerability into a charge: "They owe it to us, the grateful citizens, believers, skeptics, those who vote in favor, those who vote against, the abstainers, the exiles, the residents… all of us poor. Cubans, after all. You are the vulnerable ones."
This is not the first time that García Novoa has raised his voice this June.
He recently accused the "masters" of having abandoned the people "in the darkness of the night," and before he described the weekend blackouts as something "specifically designed to register as a dissident."
This Tuesday, he also published another text in which he sarcastically remarked that the Cuban thermoelectric plants have “multiple entry and exit visas”, valid for 20 or 30 years.
In May, the actor had already questioned the use of fuel for political acts while the people endured blackouts: “Is there fuel or not? Are gasoline and oil ideological?”
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