The Grand Master of chess Lázaro Bruzón posted a video on his Facebook profile this Sunday in which he openly describes Cuba as a "dictatorship without alternation" and claims that the island "has the worst in the economy" and "the worst in social order."
In the approximately one-and-a-half-minute reel, Bruzón begins with a simple premise: countries that function well share common traits. "They have an economy that is free, a market economy that encourages entrepreneurship, incentives, innovation, and respect for private property," he notes.
This also adds up, in the political realm, to democracy, with all its functionalities and attributes: "There is separation of powers, respect for each person's thoughts, minority rights, individual freedoms [...] power alternates, everyone can form their party, elections are held every so often, there are no lifetime positions, and those countries function well."
Against that model, Cuban reality is presented unvarnished: "In Cuba, we know what’s happening; we have the worst in the economy, we have the worst in the social order, which is, well, a dictatorship without alternation."
The chess metaphor that concludes the video is as direct as it is devastating. Bruzón compares Cuba to a player who enters the game with one piece less: "I'm going to play a game with one piece less, and then I'm going to waste all my time because I'm at an enormous disadvantage; I'm contradicting all the logical laws that make sense, and then I wonder why I'm losing."
And he concludes: "I obviously have to lose because I am violating all the laws, the principles of chess, the fundamentals. And then, on top of that, I want to find all the excuses [...] I lost without accepting that I'm playing with one piece less. That's exactly what happens in Cuba."
The statement adds to a series of declarations that the chess player has made throughout 2026 with increasing intensity. In February, he accused the regime of having "sunk" the country since 1959; in April, he described its leaders as people "sick with power" who "have always sacrificed the people for their personal interests"; in May, he denounced that indoctrination "leads to fanaticism" and "impairs critical thinking"; and in June, he defended that "free Cubans speak from real profiles", in a critical reference to the regime's "cyber combatants."
At the beginning of this month, Bruzón featured in another episode that illustrates the personal cost of his stance: he reported that his mother was mistreated in a store in Las Tunas due to the political opinions he expresses from exile, and described his home province as a "leader in informants and troublemakers." He has repeatedly stated that he will not return to Cuba until the country is free and democratic.
Bruzón, born in Holguín in 1982, earned the title of Grandmaster at the age of 17, became the under-20 world youth champion in 2000, and won the Cuban Championship six times, achieving a peak Elo of 2,717 in 2012. He left the island in July 2018 and has been competing under the American flag since 2020.
The figures support the diagnosis outlined in the video. According to the Center for Cuban Economic Studies (CEEC) at the University of Havana, Cuban GDP fell by 5% in 2025, marking its third consecutive year of decline, with a cumulative contraction exceeding 15% between 2020 and 2025. Year-on-year inflation reached 25.19% in August 2026, and according to the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH), eight out of ten Cubans have skipped at least one meal daily due to lack of money or food.
The regime attributes the deterioration to the U.S. embargo. For Bruzón, however, Cuba is not losing due to external causes: it has been playing with one piece less for decades.
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