The Cuban writer and editor Andrés Jorge issued a strong warning about the crisis facing Cuba: the regime neither has the capacity nor the willingness to resolve the problems it itself has created, and waiting for it to do so is a mistake. He stated this in an interview with CiberCuba from Miami, where he was at the end of July.
"Cancer is not going to provide the solutions; that is clearer than ever," stated Andrés Jorge, using that metaphor to refer to the system that has controlled the island for over six decades.
The writer, born in Pinar del Río in 1960 and residing in Mexico for decades, since 1991, was not surprised that the President Miguel Díaz-Canel did not announce concrete measures to address the economic crisis shaking the country, during the ceremony for the 73rd anniversary of the attack on Moncada. In that speech on July 26, no emergency measures or any additional structural changes were presented.
"In a normal country, the leader stands before the people on an important date, with a country in crisis, to say: we are going to start the measures tomorrow, to make economic changes, political changes, we start tomorrow," said journalist Tania Costa during the interview with Andrés Jorge.
In this regard, the journalist recalled that Díaz-Canel announced a package of 176 economic measures on June 12 —which included greater business autonomy, opening up to diaspora investment, and promoting renewable energy— and that, at the time of the interview, none of them had been implemented. "The measures were presented on June 12, and I still believe they have not been applied," she noted during the interview.
For his part, the writer invoked the figure of George Orwell. He prefers to discuss the system and its structures rather than pointing out specific individuals, as he believes that the issues in Cuba are of a symbolic and structural nature, not personal.
"I'm not going to call anyone by their name because I'm not interested; I prefer to think like Orwell: that if something is going to transcend, it must be expressed through the necessary symbols," he explained. He added, "No one remembers anything else that Orwell wrote besides '1984' and 'Animal Farm,' because he had the symbolic capacity to represent a world of how dictatorships are formed, of how dictatorships develop."
Andrés Jorge dismissed violence as a means of resolution but insisted that there are multiple non-violent pressure tools that have not yet been thoroughly explored. He cited the freezing of bank accounts as an example: "I ask myself: if these people who govern the country have bank accounts, why can anyone in the world have their bank accounts frozen, but those in Cuba cannot?"
The writer urged Cubans in the diaspora to focus on concrete and urgent solutions, rather than getting swept up in the current media dynamics. In this context, he mentioned the release and exile of Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara —a political prisoner of the San Isidro Movement who arrived in Miami in mid-July— as an example of how the media and the Cuban community thrive on "heroes of the moment" without progressing toward structural transformations.
"If someone has the best scalpel right now and we need to use it, we will. If someone has the best ideas... we will use them, because what needs to be saved is our mother," concluded Jorge, appealing to the unity of Cubans around a common goal: the end of the dictatorship and the democratization of Cuba.
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