Just on the day that Miguel Díaz-Canel toured the workers' social circle "Félix Elmusa" - popularly known as El Náutico - to showcase it as an achievement of the regime, a video published by the Facebook page "Cuba en Fotos" reveals the other side of that facility: Cubans waiting in line for up to four hours under the sun in an attempt to enter the beach, without any guarantee of success.
The author of the video, recorded at the entrance of the venue located in the Náutico neighborhood, Playa municipality, is Roberto Suárez, photographer for the newspaper Juventud Rebelde.
Suárez documents how buses and cars carrying workers from the Ministries of Transport, Communications, and Aviation pass by (the Náutico provides services to the unions of those sectors), while the other users, like him, wait in an endless line.
"First, those with priority are admitted, meaning the beach members, those who belong to those entities, to those workplaces, and only then do people coming from outside enter," the author explains.
Her warning is straightforward: "If you are street people, I do not recommend coming here, because you'll face a long wait, you could be here for three or four hours in the morning, waiting; you would get in around 11 or 12 o'clock."
The photographer waited in line for two hours. Many people gave up and left before they could enter.
At the end of the video, just about at the door, Suárez summarizes with resignation: "Two hours later, we're practically at the door. But well, you know, two hours."
The recording accumulated over 265,000 views.
The contrast with the official visit is hard to ignore.
On Saturday, Díaz-Canel and his wife Lis Cuesta Perazavisited the facility, which reopened at the beginning of July after four months of rehabilitation led by CACSA.
After touring the diving areas, gym, pool, pizzeria, art gallery, and children's room, the leader expressed: "This is an experience that can be multiplied." The center's manager, Maytée Crespo Alonso, was more cautious: "The challenge is to sustain it."
What the regime presented as a space "open to the public" actually has an access hierarchy that excludes workers who also need recreational options but cannot do so because most of the workers' social circles have been destroyed.
The author of the video states it plainly: "I believe that all these beaches should be open to everyone equally, and that people, regardless of where they are from, should be able to become members and enjoy the facility, which truly belongs to everyone."
"The beach you ended up with, well, unfortunately, that's the one you got," concludes the author of the video, with a phrase that summarizes better than any official speech the inequality that the regime has been promising to eliminate for 67 years.
The pattern is not new. In 2025, the regime restored the FAR Club - formerly the Miramar Yacht Club - for the exclusive use of military personnel. Now it’s El Náutico's turn for workers of Transporte, ETECSA, and Aviation. And what about the others?
Meanwhile, the CSO "Julio Antonio Mella", the former Havana Yacht Club, remains closed and in ruins, and the facility "La Concha", just meters from the Nautical Club, was destroyed by a fire in December 2024 after decades of abandonment.
All of this is happening in the toughest summer that Cubans have experienced in decades: blackouts lasting between 20 and 35 hours a day in Havana and an average salary that barely reaches 12 dollars a month in the informal exchange.
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