The Cuban audiovisual creator Eduardo González Rodríguez published this week on his Facebook profile a text that has circulated widely among Cubans both on the island and abroad, in which he recounts a daily scene in his neighborhood to highlight the gap between the official rhetoric of "resistance" and the real hunger experienced by the population.
The text, titled "The Silence of the Lambs," begins with an image that conveys everything: his wife crying as she serves food in a plastic container for a neighbor in the neighborhood, a man with a cognitive disorder who earns his living by mowing lawns and who once asked if they had any leftovers to eat.
“It’s for Juanito. He came again to see if we had any food left. My heart is breaking into pieces!” González Rodríguez stated.
The scene serves as a starting point for a relentless 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 declares that he does not believe "in 176 measures, in economic resizing, in urgent plans, in the 'we have to produce' of government spokespeople, nor in the honesty of those who claim to defend an ideal yet do not fit in 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 island of enchantment, I feel disgust, a lot of disgust."
Juanito, writes González Rodríguez, "got lost in the terrible abomination of another night without light with his green plastic canteen 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 he concludes with irony directed at those who defend the heroism of enduring: "If there were any heroism, those who lead this country would be in the dark and practicing intermittent fasting."
The voice of González Rodríguez joins that of other intellectuals who publicly rejected that official narrative in 2026.
The professor Julio César González Pagés questioned the discourse of "creative resistance" in August, stating that it cannot be upheld when people face entire days without electricity, water, or food.
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