The Cuban essayist Emilio Barreto Ramírez published on Thursday the 17th on the website CubaxCuba the text "The Avarice of the Manufacturers of Misery", in which he applies the power theory of the Bulgarian writer Elías Canetti to the Cuban reality, arguing that since 1959, the regime has exerted total control over citizens through four mechanisms: control of space, control of time, constant surveillance, and the calculated management of false hope.
The analysis is based on the data from the IX Report on the State of Social Rights in Cuba, published in August by the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH) and based on 1,318 interviews conducted in the 15 provinces of the country. The report, which documents the worst level of extreme poverty in the series, reveals that 94% of Cubans live below the threshold of $1.90 a day; that eight out of ten cannot afford three meals a day, and that 95% disapprove of the government management led by Miguel Díaz-Canel and Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz.
Barreto Ramírez points out that in any democracy, such figures would be enough to force a political transition, but he warns that the Communist Party of Cuba will not relinquish power willingly. To explain why, he refers to two major theories.
The first is that of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984), who described power as networked: distributed within the social fabric and exercisable by each individual. However, the essayist argues that this construct presupposes freedoms and institutional order, and that Foucault "could never even consider the possibility of the exercise of power within a society that is hermetically sealed off, like the Cuban one, despite the presence of the internet and social networks."
The second theory, which Barreto Ramírez considers to be more relevant, is that of Elías Canetti (1905 - 1994), Nobel Prize in Literature, articulated in his essay Crowds and Power (1960). Canetti explains real power through the metaphor of the cat and the mouse: when the feline catches the rodent and immediately annihilates it, it exerts authority; but when it lets it go, allowing it to run a few centimeters before catching it again, it reveals true power, «the one that intertwines space, time, vigilance, and hope».
Applied to Cuba, that metaphor takes on precise contours. "Space and time within Cuban society after 1959 have been under absolute police control," writes the essayist and professor, who adds that surveillance is equally constant "in closed societies due to the existence of an infallible and impregnable ideological canon." Hope, asserts the also Doctor in Communication Sciences, is the most sophisticated instrument: "There are moments in which the power allows an apparent capacity for movement based on widening the space of movement for the mass that is the object of power by a few meters," an illusion that the regime manages to keep the population as an object and not as a social subject.
That pattern has documented and recent expressions. According to a report from Cubalex released a few days ago, there were 1,894 events of human rights violations recorded in the first half of 2026 —more than ten daily— and 766 protests across the country. A report on digital surveillance published in January also revealed that 98.5% of the declarants suffered reprisals for their activities on social media and that over 84% experienced subsequent physical surveillance.
Barreto Ramírez concludes that the Cuban communist power is “omnipotent, infallible, impregnable, and omniscient” by design, and that it will continue to behave this way: “The only thing necessary is to learn to understand it, to ultimately become aware that nothing good can ever be expected from it!”
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