The Deputy Prime Minister Eduardo Martínez appeared on Friday at the Round Table of state television to defend, with his usual solemnity, the 13 social policies of the regime, articulated in more than thirty programs that, according to him, "have accompanied the lives of Cubans" since 1959. What he did not mention is that thousands of Cubans were unable to watch the broadcast: they had no electricity.
According to the official Cubadebate, Martínez began with the necessary reminder: “since the very triumph of the Revolution, our country has started to implement a series of social policies.” And he was emphatic: “we can state categorically that they have achieved significant results over all these years.”
To illustrate these achievements, the official referred to the healthcare system: before 1959, there were "around only seventy entities between hospitals and private clinics"; today, he claimed, the country has more than ten thousand health institutions, 149 hospitals, over 451 polyclinics, and more than seventy thousand doctors.
However, the reality that Martínez himself eventually admitted dismantles part of the triumphalist discourse: "Social indicators in our country have been deteriorating." The infant mortality rate, which used to be four per every thousand live births, is now 9.3. "It has doubled precisely because of this escalation of the blockade," he said, resorting to the usual argument.
What Martínez did not mention is that infant mortality increased by 148% between 2018 and 2025, rising from 4.0 to 9.9 per thousand live births, according to the Economic Research and Policy Center in the United States. In Havana, the rate reached 14 per thousand at the beginning of 2026. Maternal mortality, which the official placed at 30.8 per hundred thousand live births, was already 44.1 in 2025, a recent decline that he preferred to omit.
It also did not mention that the survival rate of children with cancer fell from 85% to 65% due to a lack of medications, nor that Cuba only covers 30% of its basic drug list. He did acknowledge that there are more than one hundred thousand people on the surgical waiting list —including more than a thousand children— and that pharmaceutical production plants are halted "because they lack fuel for their boilers to operate."
The most striking phrase came when Martínez described the situation as "genocide": "the impact is real, it is a siege that is truly genocide, it has no other name." Immediately after, the official announced a significant advancement with an investment of over five million dollars to revive the production plant for oncology medications.
Regarding international medical cooperation, the U.S. Secretary of State pointed out: "This has fundamentally been attacked by the policies led by Marco Rubio, especially by cutting all medical cooperation and instilling fear in countries." The embargo and Washington as the usual scapegoats, while the energy crisis experiences blackouts lasting between twenty and 40 consecutive hours and a deficit that has repeatedly exceeded 2,000 MW in recent weeks, resulting from decades of disinvestment and mismanagement.
The comments in the Facebook live stream were more eloquent than any official slide. "There’s no electricity to watch the Round Table... or the Triangular one," wrote one user. "Institutionalized infamy, this program shouldn’t even exist; in the end, no one watches it because there’s no power," pointed out another. "Clearly, there is electricity for this... for those who produce nothing, contribute nothing, just talk and talk," declared a third.
Martínez concluded by announcing that the transformations approved by the parliament —the package of 176 measures, which includes a minimum wage of 3,210 pesos starting this month— are "deep transformations" that "demand greater urgency," thus acknowledging the delays accumulated over the years. One Cuban summed it all up in four words in the comments: "The never-ending story."
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