The Cuban jurist and professor René Fidel González García published a new reflection on Facebook this Sunday from Santiago de Cuba, where he introduces the concept of “political indigence” to describe the condition of the majority of his compatriots, and calls for the recovery of political equality as an essential condition to transform the reality of the island.
In the post circulating on social media, González García presents a central thesis: "Political poverty inevitably leads to economic and social poverty."
The jurist, Doctor of Legal Sciences and former full professor at the University of Oriente, argues that the majority of Cubans are caught in a fruitless cycle of complaints and distractions to which a political significance is mistakenly attributed that they do not possess.
"If we seem to be trapped in a loop of complaints, trivialities, and distractions of all kinds, to which we naïvely and foolishly assign political functions, meanings, and scopes that they do not and will never have, it is because we are a majority of political impoverished individuals. The pariahs of a system of relationships that appears destined —as we can see every day— to exclude us in Cuba in every possible way," he wrote.
In light of that diagnosis, González García suggests a collective introspection exercise before seeking solutions: to ask two direct questions, both to oneself and to family members, friends, and neighbors, whether they are in Cuba or not: Am I a political beggar? What makes me a political beggar?
The jurist also establishes a conceptual distinction between the "political indigent" — someone who has been excluded from the system — and the "political marginal," whom he describes as someone who does not contemplate those questions... "Being a political indigent is, in any case, something very different from being a political marginal. Especially if you are a successful political marginal," he noted, adding that "the political marginal lacks commitment to anything other than their own success, and these two questions […] are about us, about that commitment that is the 'us'."
The text concludes with a call to action: "Only in this way will it be possible for us, the excluded, to begin to reclaim politics and full citizenship in the pursuit of happiness."
This reflection is part of a series of public statements made by González García throughout 2026. At the end of July, hestated that Cubans have less political rights and freedoms today than in 1953, during the Batista dictatorship, and at the beginning of August, hedirectly challenged the Communist Party of Cuba, questioning whether its leaders would support what he described as a process of privatization and impoverishment: “They can no longer even invoke the definition of a dictatorship of the proletariat. It is against the proletarians, at the expense of the proletarians, without the proletarians.”
The context in which González García publishes these reflections is one of profound structural crisis. The Cuban Observatory of Human Rights reported on August 13 that extreme poverty affects 94% of Cubans, using a threshold of $1.90 per day per person. A study by economist Javier Pérez Capdevila estimated that a person needs at least 96,060 Cuban pesos monthly to cover basic needs, around 14 times the average salary.
In terms of repression, Prisoners Defenders documented 1,327 political prisoners as of the end of July 2026, and in the first half of the year, nearly two thousand repressive actions were recorded on the island.
González García was removed from his teaching position at the Universidad de Oriente on November 11, 2016, after publishing critical articles in independent media. The institution claimed that his texts lacked scientific merit and negatively impacted professional training, although he and human rights organizations argued that it was a political retaliation. Since then, he has maintained a constant public presence through Facebook and independent media.
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