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The Cuban poet Jorje Luis Mederos (Veleta) published this Thursday a haunting sonnet about the circumstances of the island: fourteen verses addressed to José Martí in which he confesses the shame of surviving in a Cuba without light, without bread, and without a future.
The poem addresses the Apostle of Independence by his full name—José Julián Martí Pérez—as a moral interlocutor before whom the poet declares himself guilty of existing under a system that betrays everything Martí stood for.
Mederos, born in 1963 in Santa Clara, constructs the sonnet as a confession in three parts, each stanza led by the same phrase: "What a shame it gives me." In the first quatrain, the denunciation is material and direct: "to live like traitors in your eyes / and to thrive on this sort of spoils / blinds the light and inflates the bread."
The second quartet transforms shame into something existential: "surviving defeated, / I, who bet everything on the impossible: / to be just another Cuban, a disposable thing / in the hands of neglect and forgetfulness."
The third movement strikes with an image of intimate surrender: "to have neither dreams nor future, / secretly chewing my hard bread / and yoking myself with a quiet soul."
But it is the final verse that holds the entire historical weight of the text: "I was the New Man and now I am the goal / of the Dead Man and of a dark country."
The reference to the "New Man" is not decorative. This concept was formulated by Ernesto "Che" Guevara in his essay "Socialism and Man in Cuba" (1965) as the central anthropological project of the revolution: to create a human being driven by collective solidarity, not by personal interest. For decades, it justified the material sacrifice of entire generations. Veleta precisely inverts it: that which was shaped as the "New Man" is now the "Dead Man," destroyed by the very system that promised to forge him.
The verses "blind the light and increased the price of bread" are not a metaphor: they are a literal description of Cuba in 2026. The electricity deficit has repeatedly exceeded figures above 2,000 MW in May, June, and so far in July with blackouts lasting more than 24 hours daily. Rice exceeds 400 pesos per pound in the informal market, while state salaries barely reach 7,000 pesos monthly. 33.9% of households reported that at least one person went to bed hungry in the 30 days prior to a May survey, and 89% of the population lives in extreme poverty.
This sonnet is part of a poetic cycle about the Cuban collapse that Veleta has been developing for months: in April, he published "A Country Where Poets Escape" and "I Don't Want My Country to Be Bombed"; in May, "Four Simple Steps to Kill a Man."
The response on social media was immediate. Writers, intellectuals, and citizens reacted with words that ranged from admiration to sorrow. A well-known writer stated, "I am not mistaken, you are the voice of a people that is agonizing." A philosopher and activist summarized her reading in one word: "Demolishing." A poet described it as "Unsurpassable."
A commentator noted that "the 'new man' died before birth" and that "poetry feeds on the cruelest times and the most acute crises." A reader provided a more hopeful interpretation: "What shame and what pain; but there is a mistake, poet, your soul is not bound in quiet submission; it flutters, it charges, it challenges, and it clings to your verses like a liberating machete."
Another voice among the readers expressed it simply: "The homeland is in your verses, hugs poet, all we have left is hope."
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