The Cuban poet Jorje Luis (Veleta) Mederos published on his Facebook profile this Friday the poem «The Death of the Hero», a text that portrays death on the island not as a heroic act but as a mundane and silent process, stripped of all epic qualities.
Veleta Mederos, born in Santa Clara in 1963 and a member of the literary group El Club del Poste, opens the poem with a confession voiced by the lyrical subject: "I would have liked to die decently like a hero, / or, in the worst case, / like a pampered old man favored by his grandchildren." However, he states, the Cuban reality closed off that possibility a long time ago: "It has been a long time since death / has tended not to negotiate with Cubans."
The text outlines a genealogy of heroism on the island that ultimately leads to its own extinction. Those who once embodied that ideal, the poet notes, “grew fat / dressed in plaintive guayaberas that never smelled of gunpowder,” an image that directly targets the nomenclature of the regime, those who turned revolutionary discourse into personal privilege.
What remains, according to the poem, is a death devoid of grandeur: "It turns out that Cubans haven't died like heroes for a long time: / they're swallowed by the Darién or the Gulf Stream, / they commit natural death in hospitals as dead as they are." The reference to hospitals as places "as dead" as their patients encapsulates the severe deterioration of a healthcare system that, according to the United Nations, had around 100,000 pending surgeries by June 2026, about 11,000 of which were pediatric, while only about 30% of essential medications were available in the country.
The poet also describes those who die "chained to rum and garbage like they are crab dust, / dreaming of food, / sad, as almost all Cubans are sad." A sadness that has concrete figures: 33.9% of households surveyed in the National Food Security Survey "There's Hunger in Cuba 2025," conducted by the Food Monitor Program (FMP) and Cuido60, reported that at least one member went to bed hungry due to a lack of food in the previous 30 days.
The most devastating image of the poem is also the simplest: "Now dying in Cuba is a simple procedure, / like the line we stand in quietly." Death reduced to just another queue, part of the same ritual of waiting that defines daily life on the island.
Veleta confesses that, if he has "good luck," he will die in exile: "in some Hialeah of this world / or in a dark suburb / of the Federal District of Mexico City." The irony is brutal: the fate of despair becomes the best possible scenario. Between 2021 and mid-2024, more than 860,000 Cubans emigrated only to the United States.
The poem concludes with an image of collective defeat anchored in a specific place: "Here we remain the ones who survive, / without glory, / without land, / without loves / in the cowardly land of Antón Díaz." Antón Díaz is the neighborhood located west of Santa Clara where the poet grew up, a popular council of approximately 6,995 inhabitants that serves in the text as a symbol of everything that was lost.
"The Death of the Hero" is the most recent link in a poetic cycle of protest that Veleta Mederos has been building throughout 2026 on Facebook. Prior to this, she published the sonnet that reverses the ideal of the "New Man" to denounce the "Dead Man," and the poem "Protective Society", concerning the Cuban diaspora in Florida.
The context surrounding these verses is that of the worst humanitarian crisis Cuba has faced in decades: blackouts that frequently exceed 20 hours a day, an infant mortality rate at the end of 2025 exceeding 9.5 per 1,000 live births, the highest recorded in two decades, and a country devastated on nearly all fronts.
The poetic speaker of Veleta expresses it in verse with the same precision and spiritual weight as someone who experiences it: "The heroes leave on a raft, and the sea returns them to us with their cries inside."
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