On the 32nd anniversary of the Maleconazo, the official newspaper Granma published an article this Wednesday that reinterprets the massive popular protest of August 5, 1994, in Havana, transforming it into a heroic episode of Fidel Castro, while ignoring the violent repression and mass detentions with which the regime crushed that day.
The text, titled "The Example Capable of Dispelling the Worst Omens" and part of the state campaign "100 Years with Fidel," asserts that "a tyrant, in a similar situation, would have ordered a shooting, without hesitation, without guilt," and portrays Castro as a merciful leader who instructed his guards to "silence their weapons" and "preferred to endure any possible harm."
The official narrative attributes the disturbances to "antisocial elements, motivated by the hypocritical U.S. strategy of suffocation and encouragement of migration," erasing in an instant the genuine desperation of thousands of Havana residents who took to the streets of Galiano and San Lázaro driven by hunger, blackouts lasting up to 16 hours a day, and the misery of the Special Period.
What Granma omits is that the repression was immediate, organized, and violent. The National Revolutionary Police, the special brigade known as La Roca, the Rapid Response Brigades, and workers from the civil contingent Blas Roca Calderío —armed with rebar, sticks, and pipes— assaulted unarmed protesters.
State Security agents operated in plain clothes to infiltrate and drag citizens into police vehicles.
Witnesses from that era described how regime forces would grab women by the hair to force them into buses and patrol cars.
It is estimated that hundreds of people were arrested during that day. The initial charges of rebellion were later changed to common crimes —vandalism, contempt, public disorder— to criminalize the protest and deny the existence of political prisoners.
The Granma itself acknowledges, albeit unintentionally, the presence of those forces when it laments that "nobody would return the lost eye of a builder from the Blas Roca contingent, one of the most valuable armies of the Revolution on that day." The text portrays the paramilitaries as victims, not as aggressors.
In the same vein, the Communist Party of Cuba published on its official account: "From Fidel, we learned that threats and attempts to destroy the Revolution are faced united, always alongside the people."
The former Minister of Culture Abel Prieto went even further on Facebook, stating that Castro "dissolved the 'uprising' in a matter of minutes" with his "moral vest" and that "most of the protesters began to shout 'Long live Fidel!'."
This rewrite is not new. In August 2023, the Ministry of the Interior had already presented the Maleconazo as "the great victory of the people", which sparked a wave of critical responses from Cubans on social media.
The propaganda campaign this year is intensifying because on August 13, 2026, Castro would have turned 100 years old, a key date in the "Year of the Centennial" officially declared in December 2025 at the proposal of Miguel Díaz-Canel before the National Assembly.
What the official propaganda also does not mention is the outcome of that crisis: unable to contain social tensions solely through repression, the regime announced days later that it would not prevent those who wanted to emigrate from leaving by sea.
That "safety valve" triggered the Raft Crisis of 1994, during which over 35,000 Cubans fled in makeshift boats to the United States.
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