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The official troubadour Raúl Torres published this Friday a lengthy text on Facebook where he poetically depicted the Cuban collapse as if misery were a literary genre and 40-hour blackouts a metaphor for human resilience.
A troubadour of the regime, Torres began with an endearing greeting: "Little brother and little sister of this island beating at this moment, with a difficult rhythm of son and now of distribution" [...] and that at times, seems to want to stop in the mud of discord: "listen to me": a full display of his rhetorical poetic arsenal.
The core of his message was a love declaration to the Cuban people that sounds more like anesthesia than a vision of reality: "I love you in your bravery to stand tall when the ground trembles, in your laughter that seeps through the cracks of the collapse, in your ingenuity that turns nothing into everything."
That the ground shakes and there are cracks is, in Cuba in 2026, not a poetic image: it is the news update from any neighborhood in the capital, where building collapses have become routine, including one on the Malecón on June 10 and at least two more in Old Havana recently.
But Torres does not dwell on those uncomfortable details. In his universe, the ones responsible for the ills of Cuba are not 67 years of communist dictatorship, but "the owners and magnates of the media and networks, with their echoes of division." The regime, the Communist Party, and the military conglomerate GAESA: none appear in the text even once.
The troubadour also revived the sweet solution favored by official propaganda: the "solidarity" embodied in sending doctors and teachers abroad, without mentioning that these missions have been internationally denounced as forced labor. His conclusion was that "if there is a living school of what it means to be human in the worst conditions, that school is called Cuba."
The reality that Torres transforms into poetry is much less lyrical: Cuba has experienced an economic contraction of over 26% since 2020, an average salary of barely 15 dollars per month, and power outages lasting between 20 and 40 consecutive hours. The regime has just presented a package of 176 economic measures that the economist Pedro Monreal described as a "monster" and a "deformed hybrid", and which the United States Department of State referred to as "superficial smoke signals."
This is not the first instance of propaganda lyricism from Torres. Last May, he stated that "in Cuba, those who govern do not enrich themselves", a declaration that was widely ridiculed given the documented enrichment of the Castro families and their acolytes. In March, he posed on a tank from MINFAR and became the meme of the day. In August 2025, he released "Soy por Fidel" to celebrate the 99th anniversary of Castro's birth.
On social media, the comments on the post were not what Torres expected: several users pointed out the stark contrast between his text and the reality they live. “A bit more of the same, we are continuity and we're going for more,” someone ironically remarked.
The text concludes by inviting us to be "a beacon," with a "lyrical" fervor for a people who [...] from ruin, teach the world that the only possible homeland is one of love. Meanwhile, the housing deficit in Cuba exceeds a million homes, and 116,000 people are living in shelters. In this context, Torres reaffirms himself as aarchitect of officialist lyricism at the service of those managing the collapse.
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