The Cuban humorist Luis Alberto Vicet Vives (La Crema) published a musical parody on Facebook that has already garnered nearly 12,000 views: “If Ricky Martin Were Cuban and Sang to Utopia,” a reggaeton-style dismantling of Miguel Díaz-Canel's latest philosophical statements.
The piece uses the melody of "Livin' la Vida Loca" to do what many Cubans have been thinking about for days: turning the metaphor of utopia on the horizon—which the leader mentioned in an interview in response to whether Cuba could emerge from the crisis—into neighborhood joke material.
The lyrics start straightforwardly: "Díaz-Canel, two steps back from utopia. Díaz-Canel, ten steps forward already. Once again, the power's gone at my aunt's house. I don't know where the horizon is."
Because that was exactly what Díaz-Canel said when the correspondent from RT en Español, Oliver Zamora, asked him if there was a way out: instead of a plan, he recited a paraphrase from the writer Eduardo Galeano about the utopia that always recedes. "What is the purpose of utopia? To walk," affirmed the leader, with the solemnity of someone who believes they have said something profound.
The parody of La Crema recalls the viral video from 2020 in which Díaz-Canel declared that "lemonade is the basis of everything" and refers to him as "Limonardo": "Don't pay attention to Limonardo; that was a lemonade overdose when he said that." Six years of presidential oddities condensed into a single verse.
"It’s every day, with that utopia, that Canel says is good for walking. Not even the police will stop the people from laughing at all the things you say, you animal," the song goes.
The climax is where the parody stops being just humor and becomes a catalog of failures: "There’s no paper to clean your utopia. Díaz-Canel, the people can’t take it anymore."
The scarcity, the blackouts, Raúl Castro - all of this fits into just over a minute - and it concludes with a warning: "Let Trump find out that China is lurking on the horizon."
La Crema is not alone in this.
The comedian Ulises Toirac had already turned the utopia into an unreachable "power outage dog".
The actor Armando Tomey published a reel where he calls Díaz-Canel "a puppet, a clown, and an abuser" and describes the Cuban utopia as "a murderous cancer that has destroyed a nation by subjecting it to hunger, repression, and despair."
While the leader promises to walk toward the horizon, Cubans have been responding for weeks with the only thing they cannot be silenced: humor. And La Crema, with Ricky Martin playing in the background, has just provided the perfect soundtrack to that response.
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