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The Cuban comedy group La Leña del Humor responded this Sunday with a scathing satire to the official call to join the "Quick Pot-banging Brigades," declaring themselves "Internationalist-Pots" and announcing that they are ready to bang their pots for anyone who needs it, as long as they are given the one-way ticket to the north.
The trigger was the statement made by Miguel Díaz-Canel in an interview with the Puerto Rican weekly CLARIDAD, published on Thursday, July 3, in which the leader suggested that Cubans protesting with pots and pans should direct their efforts towards Washington: “People are banging pots, some with more discontent than others. I say: well, bang your pots at the neighbors to the north, who are the ones keeping us in this blackout”.
La Leña del Humor, founded in 1986 in Santa Clara and self-proclaimed "the best comedy group in Cuba," took the presidential suggestion literally and made it the central theme of their satire.
"At the call of the highest leadership of CULTURE, we step forward. We belong to the 'Quick Pot Brigade' and we are also 'Internationalist Cauldronists,'" the group wrote on its Facebook page, with the martial and determined tone that the regime reserves for its revolutionary mobilizations.
The show they are promoting is titled "HUMOR AL... ¡TAN-TAN-TAN-TAN-TAN-TAN…!!!", which the group itself acknowledges as "a bit onomatopoeic," although they claim that "it makes people laugh and leaves anyone deaf": a description that, in the current Cuban context, sounds like a literal depiction of a night in any neighborhood during a blackout.
The group's conditions for joining the brigade are clear and non-negotiable: "We are willing to go wherever we are sent, called, or can simply make it. If it's to the north, EVEN BETTER... We just need them to give us the opportunity and a one-way ticket; the rest is on us."
The phrase "one-way ticket" encapsulates all the irony of the text: in an island where mass exodus is a reality and where securing a flight is akin to a logistical miracle, the group's non-negotiable condition is precisely what the regime would never finance.
The call to the audience is equally spirited: "We tell our audience that if they want to see us, grab some ladles and pots and join our brigade," followed by the chorus they have memorized: "Wherever it is, ehhh... wherever it is...!"
The parody targets two simultaneous objectives: the "rapid response brigades" of the Castro regime—historically mobilized groups for repressing protests—and the tradition of Cuban revolutionary internationalism, in which the regime sent doctors, soldiers, and advisors across the globe while the Island was falling apart.
Humor emerges at a moment of extreme gravity. Cuba recorded a historic high of 107 street protests in June 2026, nearly double the previous record, according to the Cuban Conflict Observatory. The electricity deficit reached 2,208 MW on June 25, leaving about 70% of the country without power, with 11 thermoelectric units out of service as of July 4.
Díaz-Canel himself admitted in the same interview: "There is a scarcity of transportation, food, and medicine; there are prolonged blackouts of more than twenty hours. That causes dissatisfaction; no one can be happy, the people are suffering." And yet, his solution was to point the ladle northward.
On social media, Cubans responded in kind. A comment circulated widely: "Full pots do not make noise; their clanging is for hunger and for freedom." Another, more direct, pointed to the implicit authorization of the ruler: "As long as he doesn't send anyone to jail, since he himself authorized it."
Political humor in Cuba is a minefield: the regime promotes it when it serves the revolution and represses it when it turns against it. In February 2026, the creators of the satirical project El4tico were detained in Holguín. La Leña del Humor, which in May 2024 had already reported that it could not perform in more provinces due to a lack of state budget, knows well where the line is drawn. Perhaps for this reason, their best joke is not the show they announce, but the condition they set: a one-way ticket, not a return.
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