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The official singer-songwriter Raúl Torres published an extensive post on his Facebook profile this Sunday, where, while counting low-denomination bills on a table, he demanded that Cuban leaders come closer to the reality of the people. The stated trigger was the banking crisis: "Today, when I learned that the bank is only giving 500 pesos per customer, man, I got a lump in my throat. It's not resentment, it's pain."
The text, published a day after the fifth anniversary of July 11, 2021, blends Fidelista nostalgia, kitschy lyricism, and veiled criticism of the bureaucracy, yet it never strays from the revolutionary framework that Torres has defended for decades as the cultural spokesperson of the regime.
The central inconsistency of the post is hard to overlook. Torres calls for the leaders to "descend into the hell of everyday life and feel in their own bones what the grandparents who can't make ends meet feel, the father who can't buy milk, the young person who looks at the malecón and wonders if there is a future beyond." Yet, in the postscript of the same text, he defends them without reservations: "All the leaders are as caught up with the water and the current as the worst of us, that's a fact, I've seen it."
The same paragraph that denounces ultimately shields the system. Torres concludes the post by praising the "DC" —Miguel Díaz-Canel— as an example of an active leader who "legitimizes the legacy of the commander," which undermines any interpretation of systemic criticism.
The tone oscillates between demand and Fidelista reverence. Torres recalls a photograph of Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra sharing a plate of rice with a soldier, and builds his entire argument from there: current leaders fail because they do not emulate that example, not because the system is the issue. "We all miss Fidel," he writes, "and I miss him because he did not wait for reports at a desk: he went out there."
The crisis highlighted in this post is real and serious. The Metropolitano Bank of Havana has reduced the withdrawal limit from 5,000 to 3,000 pesos per transaction in June 2026, and in practice, many branches only dispense 500 pesos once a week. The Granma government acknowledged that same month that it did not have enough cash to pay the pensions of over 111,000 retirees. More than 50% of the ATMs in Havana were not operational in May 2026.
Torres proposes solutions with the same vagueness as he diagnoses the problem: “If there’s no money, let’s hand out shopping vouchers, bonds, I don’t know... something! Let’s intervene with the money hoarders.” He adds, “I’m not an economist, I just ask for urgent solutions.” The structural cause—67 years of communist dictatorship—does not appear in any paragraph. The “blockade” does.
The singer-songwriter also threatens to delete comments that question the privileges of the leaders, whom he labels as "gusanil wave." He premiered "Homeland or Death for Life" in 2021 as an officialist response to the dissident anthem "Homeland and Life" —a song that accumulated 48,135 dislikes compared to just 4,500 likes on YouTube— and who has publicly stated that in Cuba "those in power do not become rich," now asks those same leaders to move faster.
Descemer Bueno captured it accurately in February 2021: “What will Raúl Torres say, the jester of the dictatorship?”. Five years later, Torres continues to demonstrate that the answer is always the same: to denounce with the language of condemnation and to defend with the language of loyalty, in the same text, without apparent contradiction.
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