The Cuban broadcaster Laritza Camacho published a poignant account on Facebook this Monday about her walking tour of Havana during the holiday on July 27. Her narrative dismantles the regime's triumphant rhetoric: a capital without public transport, piled-up garbage, crumbling buildings, and neighbors gathering water with carts and buckets.
"It dawns on the 27th, it's a holiday. There is no noticeable difference in a city that increasingly wakes up without transportation, without real work, with bad (almost obscene) cries and obscene music..." he wrote.
During a long walk through several municipalities, the actress encountered landslides, crowds, and "people like trash thrown in the doorways" on the popular Galiano Street.
Behind the National Library, a building that was never completed, "a sad ruin at first glance."
Everywhere, trash was proliferating: "Bonfires and garbage. Sweat and garbage. People on skateboards, gesturing, struggling. People with carts and buckets collecting water."
Upon returning home, Laritza heard an anonymous Habanero shouting, and what he said resonated with her so deeply that she transcribed it for her friends and followers.
"Everything is collapsing. The micro buildings are falling apart faster than the others. They do everything wrong; they are the epitome of inefficiency. Now they are set on destroying the underground, and no one cares."
The text arrives a day after Miguel Díaz-Canel stated at the central event on July 26 in Pinar del Río that “the response to suffocation is inventiveness, creativity, and, although it may annoy them, also the joy of the Cuban people.”
That statement triggered a flood of ironic responses on social media, with comments like "What joy?" and "Here the only feeling the people have is pain and despair. You all have joy, you lack for nothing."
The radio and television host also didn't miss the irony: "It is celebrated after the 26th, the 'happiest day in history' (I pray for the sterile dead, those who believed... it's beautiful and necessary to believe in something... amen)."
This publication is part of a sustained pattern of criticism from Laritza throughout July.
On July 25, it dismantled the official slogan "It's always the 26th", stating that what the regime conveys with that phrase is that "everything is the same, that nothing changes."
On that same day, he criticized the ruling elite: "All the measures they take are so that they and their kind can entrench themselves in power and luxury."
Days before, she stated outright: “I am against the Cuban government because the Cuban government is against Cuba. Nothing works in my country.”
His voice joins that of the comedian Ulises Toirac, who humorously remarked “it's always the 26th” this Sunday to transform it into a metaphor for the country's ongoing collapse.
Camacho concluded his chronicle with a phrase that encapsulates the reality of this holiday better than any official speech: "Holiday. Almost no one works. Just another day. Cuba 2026."
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