On the centenary of the birth of dictator Fidel Castro, Granma has chosen to pay tribute to him with an exercise in historical revisionism that reveals more about the needs of the current regime than about what happened on August 5, 1994.
Under the title 'The Example That Can Drive Away the Worst Omens', the official newspaper presents the then-ruler as a leader who, thanks to his mere presence and a supposed order to "silence the weapons", managed to stop a violent mob and prevent a massacre.
It's a convenient story. The problem is that it doesn't align with the known facts.
The Maleconazo did not start with Fidel
The protest started hours before Fidel Castro appeared at the intersection of Galiano and San Lázaro.
Thousands of people had spontaneously taken to the Malecón and the center of Havana after years of blackouts, hunger, shortages, and a growing desperation fueled by the Special Period.
The slogans "Freedom!" and "Down with Fidel!" did not arise from foreign inspiration or as part of a sophisticated psychological operation. They emerged because thousands of Cubans had reached their limit.
By the time Fidel arrived at the scene, the National Revolutionary Police, officers from the Ministry of the Interior (MININT), and the so-called Rapid Response Brigades — including members of the Blas Roca contingent and other groups mobilized by the Communist Party — had already acted to disperse the demonstration through beatings, arrests, and the use of force.
Presenting Fidel's emergence as the decisive moment that "calmed" the situation overlooks the fundamental element: the protest was already being suppressed.
"Cognitive war" in 1994?
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the article is attributing the events to "the brutality that has emerged from cognitive warfare."
The expression almost seems humorous when applied to 1994.
In that Cuba, there were no Facebook, X, YouTube, WhatsApp, Telegram, or smartphones. Access to the Internet was virtually nonexistent for the population. The vast majority of Cubans only received information controlled by the State itself.
Talking about "cognitive warfare" to explain the Maleconazo is akin to attributing social media as the catalyst for a protest that occurred when the island had minimal digital connections. It is a concept borrowed from contemporary political discourse to retrospectively reinterpret an event that had much more tangible causes: hunger, blackouts, inflation, despair, and a lack of freedoms.
The "antisocial elements"
Granma once again resorts to one of the classic resources of official language: dehumanizing the protesters.
They call them "antisocial elements."
However, there are countless testimonies, photographs, and videos from that era that reveal a different reality: workers, young people, retirees, homemakers, and ordinary citizens who publicly expressed years of accumulated discontent.
Reducing that social explosion to a handful of criminals is difficult to maintain even three decades later.
The violence that the article chooses to forget
The text discusses a builder from the Blas Roca contingent who was injured and omits any reference to the violence committed by state forces.
It doesn't mention the mass arrests. It doesn't mention the beatings reported by numerous witnesses. It doesn't mention the summary trials that followed.
It does not mention that just a few days later the regime itself opened sea exits, leading to the raft crisis, a decision that is hard to explain if everything had been reduced to a small group of "antisocials" manipulated from abroad.
If the issue was merely a few instigators, why did tens of thousands of Cubans take the opportunity to leave the country?
The mirror of the present
The most interesting aspect of the article may not be what it says about 1994, but rather what it reveals about 2026.
Granma insists on portraying popular discontent as the sole result of an external conspiracy. This is exactly the same argument used following the protests of July 11, 2021.
However, there is an evident common thread between the Maleconazo and 11J: economic crisis, shortages, decline in services, blackouts, and social frustration.
Circumstances change; discomfort persists.
Fidel and the "order not to fire"
The article portrays Fidel Castro as the leader who prevented a bloodbath by ordering his guards to lower their weapons.
Even accepting that version, an uncomfortable comparison inevitably arises with the behavior of the current Cuban leader during the protests on July 11th.
While Granma exalts the supposed serenity of Fidel in 1994, on July 11, 2021, Miguel Díaz-Canel appeared on national television to launch his now-famous call: "The order to fight is given", urging government supporters to confront the protesters violently.
That statement was followed by a large mobilization of police forces, military personnel, and government-affiliated groups, as well as by hundreds of arrests and subsequent sentences to long prison terms.
The comparison does not bode well for the leader appointed by Raúl Castro.
If Granma itself asserts that Fidel's "greatness" lay in avoiding the use of lethal force and opting for restraint, is it implicitly suggesting that Díaz-Canel has acted with less authority, less political control, or less capacity to manage a crisis?
It's a difficult read to avoid.
A story that needs no embellishments
El Maleconazo was the largest protest against the Cuban government from 1959 until 11J.
It was not a laboratory operation nor a battle of nonexistent algorithms. It was the public expression of an economic and social crisis that the State itself acknowledged at that time as the worst since the victory of the so-called "revolution."
Thirty-two years later, the insistence of the official press on reinterpreting those events with contemporary concepts and providential heroes seems to respond less to an interest in explaining history than to a need to control its memory.
Because when a regime needs to constantly rewrite the past, it is often because the present no longer suffices to convince.
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