The lawyer and director of Cubalex, Laritza Diversent, dismantled the official discourse of the Cuban regime regarding its increasing militarization and stated clearly: the deployment of special forces is not aimed at any external enemy, but at the Cuban population itself.
"The militarization is being prepared not to combat an American soldier who is going to go to Cuba because that is not going to happen," Diversent stated in an interview with Tania Costa for CiberCuba.
According to the lawyer, the reasoning behind the deployment is twofold and deliberate. “I am preparing myself and focusing all my attention on making the communities see that I have weaponry and, secondly, that I will be going against you.”
Diversent pointed to July 11, 2021 as the clearest evidence of that real intent, when Díaz-Canel issued his famous "combat order" on national television and the repressive forces went out in mass to quell the largest protests since 1959.
"The day will come when someone will go out into the streets, just like on July 11, when the order to combat was given and everyone went out to suppress. That is what militarization is for today," he declared.
The so-called "black wasps," deployed to suppress internal protests, are the visible face of this strategy. Diversent warned that the Cuban population is completely disarmed in the face of them, as Fidel Castro ensured decades ago absolute control over access to weapons.
"I don't know what other civility we would be discussing, that there will be a massacre," he said, referring to the threats of "bloodbath" made by Díaz-Canel and Chancellor Bruno Rodríguez in May 2026.
For Diversent, that warlike rhetoric is not a warning to Washington, but rather a psychological terror tool directed inward. "They are embedding all of that into psychology, instilling a fixation in children to identify it in the event of a possible attack," he denounced.
The lawyer pointed out the contradiction that reveals the true intention of the regime. The government brings military backpacks to schools and trains students with AK rifles and landmines, yet has never provided guidelines for protection against cyclones. "Excuse me, don’t take that to school. If when a cyclone was coming you never provided any support or guidance for families to protect themselves against a cyclone, are you going to do it now? A potential war, no, no, no, no, that is to intimidate and psychologically manipulate the population."
Cubalex refers to that mechanism as the "system of defenselessness." "That's what we call the system of defenselessness, where people say they have nothing more to do," Diversent explained.
The special report by Cubalex on militarization documented that in March 2026, repressive events increased by 240% compared to February, with 31 events related to security and defense, of which 61% were direct repression.
However, Diversent warned that the strategy of fear has a limit that the regime does not know how to handle. "What is happening now is that people, in the heat, without electricity, with nothing, say: 'I'm frustrated, I'm going out to the street, with a pot, and that is what they cannot deal with,'" he described.
That spontaneous disobedience, driven by more than 1,300 protests recorded in May 2026 with pot banging, barricades, and cries of "Freedom," is what the regime fears but cannot suppress.
Diversent compared the situation to what he witnessed in France, where he saw thousands of citizens protesting en masse in the Plaza de la République.
"We are just breastfed children compared to the French. They don't want to know what disobedience is. We are an extremely passive population," he acknowledged.
But she was precise in pointing out where the breaking point is: "What they cannot cope with is that it has been 67 years and they are not used to dealing with that disobedience."
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