The Cuban jurist René Fidel González García published a political reflection on his Facebook profile this Sunday, from Santiago de Cuba, in which he diagnoses a structural and irreversible break between the Cuban regime and the citizenry: not a distancing, but a disconnection.
Doctor in Legal Sciences and former tenured professor at the University of Oriente—removed from his position in November 2016 in what he and human rights organizations described as political retaliation—González García argues that the government "has maintained power while losing popular legitimacy" in a process that, in his words, "began years ago and has been intermittent and irreversible."
"It seems that they are distancing themselves from the people, and the people are distancing themselves from them; it seems like a metaphor, but it is not. It is not a distancing as most think; it is a disconnection," he writes. For the legal expert, that distinction is fundamental: it is not a gap that can be closed, but a deep fracture.
One of the central axes of his analysis is the deliberate dismantling of the State. "The State is being dismantled rapidly, piece by piece. The goal is a minimal State. It’s not a matter of theoretical choice. What remains of the other—its logic, its conception, its purposes, and its scope—seems to them to be unwieldy and expensive, exhausting and boring, a labor trap," he argues.
To describe the current rulers, González García uses the metaphor of Gulliver's boots: "Incapable of managing power both materially and symbolically, of creating and reproducing it like the political generation that preceded them, they attempt to concentrate it. [...] It's not just that the size of Gulliver's boot doesn't fit them; it's that it weighs heavily upon them. They appear like clowns when they walk in them, but beyond what they are, their size is different." And he warns that this diminished power is no less dangerous: "It is simply the power of dwarfs, their size."
The jurist denounces that the regime's strategy consists of cultivating political indifference among those who remain on the island. "They rely on the fact that, weary of so much glory and misery, sunk deep in so much precariousness and daily survival—you’ve normalized coal, but for others it’s firewood, wood from doors and windows, from chairs and other furniture—but don’t forget the scabies, the bedbugs—a growing majority of the minority of Cubans who remain will not only develop the syndrome of indifference and political amnesia […] but will also stop seeing them as the cause of the problem […] because they will no longer care about anything, absolutely nothing: indifference is the new leisure."
This publication is part of a series of critical statements that González García has made throughout 2026. In July, he stated that Cubans today have fewer liberties than in 1953, under the Batista dictatorship. In August, he directly confronted the Communist Party by asking if its leaders would support "the process of restoring capitalism," and he introduced the concept of "political indigence" to describe the exclusion faced by the majority. On September 11, he published a text about the "historical betrayal" of the Cuban people, evoking "children sleeping in hunger, emaciated" and "elders sleeping without dreams."
The context in which he writes is one of unprecedented structural crisis: extreme poverty affects 94% of Cubans according to the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, nine points more than in 2025, while ECLAC projects a GDP decline of 6.5% in 2026. Prisoners Defenders documented 1,339 political prisoners in its report published in September, a figure that represents a sad historical record.
"Just as they need a small power and a small State, they also need a small, tiny, and trivial people. They no longer long for a large feline, but for a kitten, brown like all brown cats, but a kitten nonetheless; perhaps this way— they believe— something will change, without them having to change," concludes González García.
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