The Colombian poet Fernando Rendón, president of the World Poetry Movement, published an open letter addressed to the "Cuban people" on Friday, calling on the world to "mobilize to help protect their existence and sovereignty" and attributing the lack of electricity and water on the island solely to the U.S. embargo, without at any point mentioning the responsibility of the regime after 67 years of one-party rule.
The text was disseminated through REDH-Cuba (Network in Defense of Humanity), a platform aligned with the official discourse of the Cuban regime, and also published by the state newspaper Trabajadores, which transforms the letter into a piece of propaganda rather than an independent literary reflection.
Rendón, founder of the International Poetry Festival of Medellín in 1991 and general coordinator of the World Poetry Movement since 2011, begins his letter with a lyrical evocation of January 1, 1959, when, as he writes, "a spirit reminiscent of the first day of spring swept across the Island of Light and all of Latin America."
Since that poetic spring, the text constructs a heroic and resilient Cuba: "The silent and exhausting war against you continues. The American boycott continues to block the entry of oil, goods, and essential products, food, and medicine, leading you to a difficult situation where you even lack electricity and water. Yet, despite this, your bravery and integrity remain unshaken."
The problem with that image is that it clashes directly with the documented reality. During July, power outages on the island—caused by a collapse of the electric system after decades of neglect, mismanagement, and lack of investment—averaged more than 20 hours daily, with some areas in Matanzas experiencing over 80 consecutive hours without electricity. On the 29th, the Electric Union's forecast broke another record, announcing a deficit of 2,380 MW during peak hour.
The crisis is not just electrical. Cuban authorities have acknowledged that only 30% of essential medications are available in the healthcare system. According to data from the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), in 2025, 245,264 people emigrated from Cuba. Independent estimates suggest that over a million Cubans have left the island since 2021.
This human stampede is compounded by political repression. Prisoners Defenders documented 1,306 political prisoners in Cuba as of the end of June 2026, including minors serving sentences. None of this is mentioned in Rendón's letter.
The Colombian poet concludes his letter with a call for continental solidarity: "The people of Cuba are ours: the Latin American people, to whose consciousness and spirit of unity we appeal. The destiny of our peoples is that of the continent, just as the destiny of Venezuela and Colombia is the destiny of Latin America." The mention of Venezuela is striking in a text that speaks of sovereignty and dignity, given that the country is experiencing its own political crisis following the capture of Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces in January 2026.
The phenomenon illustrated by Rendón's letter was precisely analyzed by the Cuban political scientist Armando Chaguaceda in his essay "The Enlightened Betrayal", published in June 2026. Chaguaceda described how certain progressive intellectuals "produced analyses that relativized repression, always finding an external cause — the blockade, imperialist intervention, the provocations from Miami — that shifted the responsibility away from the government."
Rendón's letter is an almost didactic example of this mechanism: the missing electricity is not a consequence of decades of centralized and failed management, but rather the result of a "North American boycott"; the scarce water does not reflect the collapse of abandoned infrastructure, but the maliciousness of the "enemy." The regime is exonerated. The Cuban people, on the other hand, become a poetic backdrop for a narrative that does not belong to them.
Chaguaceda was emphatic in assessing that complicity of silence: "That silence was not neutral. That silence was a decision."
Related videos:
Filed under: