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The Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) published this Saturday, on the Independence Day of the United States, an open letter addressed to American artists, writers, and academics in which it accuses Secretary of State Marco Rubio of lying to his own people about Cuba and describes Washington's policy towards the island as "systematic genocide."
The document, signed by the National Council of UNEAC, states that "the Secretary of State lies to the American people about our reality and fuels the interference fire with his increasingly criminal actions," and calls on American creators to condemn the sanctions of the Trump administration.
The irony of the gesture is hard to ignore: the very institution that today eloquently denounces the "global gag" that Rubio would seek to impose on the world has been applying its own gag, with remarkable efficiency, to Cuban artists who dare to dissent from the regime for decades.
The letter describes as "ridiculous" and stemming from "deluded and wicked minds" the reasons that Washington uses to pressure Cuba, and characterizes Trump's policy as "hijacked by a Cuban-American minority that benefits economically and politically" from it. It is a bold exercise in criticism that, interestingly, UNEAC has never directed toward Havana.
In October 2022, that same organization signed a letter denying the repression by the regime following the massive protests in Havana. The document was so hastily prepared that it included the signatures of individuals who had already passed away, such as the poet José Rolando Rivero, who had died weeks earlier, prompting the Cultural Directorate of Ciego de Ávila to issue a public apology.
That episode caused notable rifts: the musician Pedro Luis Ferrer severed his ties with the UNEAC and the historian Ivette García González submitted her formal resignation days later. Artists like Roberto Carcassés and Juan Antonio García Borrero even denied having signed the document.
The institution's history is long and consistent in its servility. After July 11, 2021, filmmakers and writers like Carlos Lechuga, Yunior García Aguilera, and Javier L. Mora left the organization, stating, as reported by Diario de Cuba, that they could not remain in a "choir that sings praises to those who ordered the repression." The playwright Irán Capote was excluded from his teaching position in Pinar del Río following a "purge" due to "ideological problems," and the poet Delfín Prats had his book destroyed in 1968 by the very institution that kept him in ostracism for decades.
The letter appeals to historical figures—José Martí, Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén—to construct a narrative of cultural brotherhood between the two peoples. It quotes verses from Hughes as a call "to the sanity of a government that does not represent its people": "Let the United States be the dream that dreamers dreamed. / Where kings never conspire nor tyrants plot / So that no man is crushed by another." Verses that, when read from Havana, take on a meaning that UNEAC clearly did not intend.
The document is published as Cuba faces an unprecedented energy crisis, with power outages lasting between 20 and 40 consecutive hours and a generation deficit exceeding 2,000 MW, in a situation whose structural roots predate any sanctions and are inherent to the economic model of the regime, although UNEAC prefers not to mention it.
The organization concludes its letter with a statement that, coming from the source it does, deserves to be framed: "Enough of the suffering inflicted, of conscious genocide, of the war waged against us for the mere 'sin' of defending national independence!" Words that imprisoned, exiled, or silenced Cuban artists could endorse without changing a comma, although directed towards a very different audience.
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