Lieutenant Colonel William González Hernández, head of the Provincial Civil Defense Organization of Matanzas, urged the population to prepare an emergency backpack with medications, clothing, a flashlight, water, and food in light of the possibility of a cyclone.
The call unleashed a wave of outrage on social media: Cubans pointed out the cruel irony of the regime asking to preserve precisely what does not exist.
"Our population is a wise population that knows the family guidelines to follow in the event of a hydrometeorological event: to prepare a backpack with medications, clothes, a flashlight, water, and some food," González stated in the video.
The reactions came quickly. "Medications, food, and water to store. If there's not even enough to use at the moment, how are we going to store it?" wrote a user.
Another summarized the general sentiment: "An empty backpack, how brazen." A third person was more direct: "There isn't even water. Let alone talk about medication."
"We already have the cyclone," wrote a user under the video. "Words can't express what we're experiencing. My God, how long do we have to endure?"
The context in which the call is made makes it even harder to ignore the contradiction. In terms of food, a survey conducted by the Food Monitor Program (FMP) and Cuido60 presented in May revealed that 33.9% of Cuban households have at least one member who goes to bed hungry, and that 94.9% of respondents lost access to food purchases over the last year.
Matanzas, where the video was filmed, is among the five provinces with critical levels of food insecurity according to the Food Monitor Program, alongside Havana, Cienfuegos, Guantánamo, and Santiago de Cuba.
However, the discourse around the "emergency backpack" is not new. In May, the Civil Defense distributed in Granma a family guide with almost identical recommendations —bread, cereals, canned goods, medications— as part of the "Year of Preparation for Defense" declared by the regime.
Now that same language is recycled for the hurricane season, with the same underlying issue: the State asks to save what it has not been able to provide.
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