The Cuban audiovisual creator Eduardo González Rodríguez published this week on his Facebook profile a text that has circulated widely among Cubans both on and off the island, in which he describes a daily scene in his neighborhood to highlight the gap between the official discourse of "resistance" and the real hunger experienced by the population.
The text, titled "The Silence of the Lambs," begins with an image that says it all: his wife crying as she serves food in a plastic bowl to a neighbor in the neighborhood, a man with a cognitive disorder who makes a living by doing yard work and who once asked if they had any food left over.
"It's for Juanito. He came again to see if we had any food left. My heart is breaking into pieces!" quotes González Rodríguez.
The scene serves as a starting point for a blunt reflection on power. "I have more respect for those who ask for food than for those who ask for resistance. Those who ask for food do not steal; those who ask for resistance do not know what hunger is," he writes in the phrase that encapsulates the entire weight of the text.
The filmmaker states that he does not believe "in 176 measures, nor in economic resizing, nor in urgent plans, nor in the 'we have to produce' from government spokespersons, nor in the honesty of those who claim to defend an ideal yet cannot fit into their shirts."
His rejection of the regime's narrative is explicit: "When they talk about social justice on TV as if they were speaking from an enchanted island, I feel disgust, a lot of disgust."
Juanito, writes González Rodríguez, "was lost in the terrible abomination of another night without light, with his green plastic cup in hand," an image that encapsulates the dual crisis of hunger and blackouts that Cuba is experiencing.
The author warns that "many Cubans who work will go to bed without eating on yet another night of blackout," and concludes with irony aimed at those who defend the heroism of enduring: "If it existed, those who run this country would be in the dark and practicing intermittent fasting."
The voice of González Rodríguez joins that of other intellectuals who have publicly rejected that official narrative in 2026.
The professor Julio César González Pagés questioned in August the discourse of "creative resistance", asserting that it cannot be sustained when people face days without electricity, water, or food.
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