The jurist and former university professor René Fidel González García published a text this Friday with a strong political and moral charge in which he denounces what he describes as a historical betrayal of the Cuban people, harshly addressing those who govern the island in light of images of emaciated children, hopeless elderly individuals, and families torn apart by exodus.
In the post shared on his Facebook profile, González García begins with a statement that sets the tone for the entire piece: "When it's all over, there will be a feeling of betrayal. Betrayal, like all betrayals, always at the expense of someone's trust, someone's hope, but different in its proportions, and also in its purposes."
The jurist emphasizes that this is not a betrayal of the followers of a doctrine, but something of greater scope: “Not a betrayal of the supporters of an idea […] not exactly, not entirely: a betrayal of an entire society—or several—because each generation that lived in Cuba did its part and felt part of its own society.”
In the most stark passage of the text, González García paints a picture of collective defeat: "When it is all over, the vast and terrible field of defeat will remain... the vultures, already well-groomed, alongside their spoils, but above all, the defeated will remain— their bodies and lives, their shattered and scattered hopes, the impotence."
Then he lists, with a cadence that serves as an accusation, the images that make the official discourse untenable: “Children sleeping with hunger, emaciated. The elderly sleeping without dreams, emaciated. Parents sleeping without their own parents, without their children, emaciated, absolutely emaciated.” And he finishes with a question that is also a direct insult to those in power: “How could this happen in our name, you scoundrels?”
The professor's post is accompanied by the iconic photo of the girl who hugged a stick as if it were a doll, taken by Alberto Korda in 1959, and used countless times by Cuban official propaganda to illustrate the situation of the country prior to the revolutionary triumph. The revolution that promised to eradicate all those ills ultimately betrayed the people, which can be inferred by juxtaposing the emblematic image with the strongly accusatory text.
The realities evoked by González García are not empty metaphors. According to data from the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights published in August 2026, extreme poverty affects 94% of Cubans, using a threshold of $1.90 per day per person.
The text for this Friday is part of a series of statements made by the professor throughout 2026. At the end of July, he asserted that Cubans have less political freedom today than in 1953, during Batista's dictatorship. On August 2, he directly challenged the Communist Party of Cuba, asking if its leaders would provide “political assurance for the process of restoring capitalism, for privatization, and for the commodification of socioeconomic and cultural rights [...] and for the impoverishment of the Cuban population.” In that same publication, he declared: “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.”
On August 16, he introduced the concept of "political indigence" to describe the exclusion suffered by the majority of Cubans, arguing that this condition "inevitably leads to economic and social indigence".
González García holds a Doctorate in Legal Sciences and was a tenured professor at the University of Oriente in Santiago de Cuba until November 2016, when he was dismissed after publishing critical articles in independent media. The institution claimed that his texts "lacked scientific character" and "negatively influenced the comprehensive training of the professional," but he and human rights organizations reported that this was a political retaliation.
Prisoners Defenders documented 1,327 political prisoners in Cuba at the end of July 2026, a figure that then constituted a record in the organization's records. The OCDH, for its part, counted at least 1,949 repressive actions during the first half of the year. Additionally, there is the migration crisis: according to official data from the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), Cuba recorded a negative migration balance of 245,264 people in 2025, in an exodus that has greatly increased the separation of families between the island and abroad.
The question that González García introduces in his publication —"What are they going to say, what will they say then, those who, greedy and arrogant, still tell us that everything happening is in our name?"— encapsulates the central accusation of a jurist who has been paying the price of speaking the truth out loud for a decade.
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