The popular Cuban poet José Martínez, based in Miami, stirred up social media again this Saturday with a new satirical poem titled "What Are You Waiting For?" which garnered more than 11,000 views and hundreds of likes on Facebook within just a few hours, and whose final question —"What are you waiting for? War?"— resonates like a poetic blow against the regime of the island.
Martínez, a psychologist and entrepreneur who has turned décima and other strophic forms into tools for political criticism, begins the poem without preamble: "Enough with the nonsense / because life is fleeting. / The people want nothing more / than for them to stop improvising." Fifty-six seconds later, the regime is depicted without the possibility of appeal.
The poem dedicates several verses to a recent publication by "Gerardo" —presumably referring to the Cuban ex-spy Gerardo Hernández Nordelo— which, according to the poet, received not even the slightest support: "A few days ago I saw / what Gerardo posted. / Not a single fool supported it." A description that, coming from a satirical poem, is almost a compliment compared to what follows.
Because Martínez does not stop there. The official government pages on social media receive their own diagnosis: "The government pages / are a gateway to hell. / You enter the comments / and you are greeted by a litany / of neologisms and offenses." Any Cuban who has tried to read the comments section of Cubadebate or Granma on Facebook knows that the metaphor is not an exaggeration.
The few defenders of the regime who dare to show their heads don't fare well either. The poet describes them as "two repressed cats / with restricted profiles," and he labels them with the term that is already widely circulating in the Cuban community: "ciberclarias." This word—a blend of "cyber" and "claria," the invasive catfish that has colonized Cuban rivers and reservoirs—defines the trolls and digital propagandists of the government with a zoological precision that no official dictionary would ever acknowledge.
The climax of the poem is the question that gives the piece its title, which Martínez repeats twice, as if the first time isn't enough: "If in the city and in the mountains / they no longer see any support, / if the system is in a hole, / what are they waiting for?, war?". The answer, of course, is left hanging in the air. Although the air in Cuba has been heavy for months with blackouts lasting between 20 and 40 hours a day and a power generation deficit that has surpassed 2,000 megawatts several times in recent weeks.
This new poem arrives at an especially prolific time for Martínez. In April, he published "I Don't Sign," a direct response to the officialist campaign "My Signature for the Homeland" by the Communist Party. In May, he dramatized the criminal process of Raúl Castro. On June 15, he premiered "No One Escapes to Communism". And just a few days before this new poem, "Vaseline", ironically criticizing the discreet rise of regime figures within the power structure, particularly El Cangrejo who "knows how to talk," a reference to Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, grandson of General Raúl Castro.
Martínez is not the only poet who has found in satire a way to document the disaster. Other verses have circulated within the Cuban diaspora responding to the same reality: 1,311 protests, complaints, and critical actions were documented in May across the Island; the economy is plummeting in free fall and the government continues to invent "solutions" —like the recent economic package— in front of a population that, as the poem states, no longer wants any more improvisations.
The comments under Martínez's video reflect the same frustration described in the poem: several users celebrate that someone has put into verse what many think in prose, and more than one points out that the final question—“What are they waiting for?”—has gone unanswered for years.
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