The jurist and Doctor of Legal Sciences René Fidel González García published this Friday on his Facebook profile —accompanied by a video of just over two minutes— a new political reflection in which he diagnoses that Cuba is experiencing a profound paralysis: “Today we are a society paralyzed by political underdevelopment. No one can accurately define when this definitively took hold, although surely —and tragically— it is a process that is not yet resolved.”
The starting point of the analysis is a figure acknowledged by the Cuban government itself: 876,522 people identified as being in a state of greater vulnerability, as reported by Prime Minister Manuel Marrero at the end of July 2026, during the review of the implementation of the package of 176 economic and social transformations approved the previous month.
González García, based in Santiago de Cuba and a former full professor at the University of Oriente, rejects the notion that this number is an abstract figure: "876,522 people are not a cold statistic; they are individuals, living people, people enduring conditions that are simply unacceptable. This is also the number of pain, the number of absence, the number of loneliness, and the number of oblivion."
Based on that reality, the jurist constructs a balance that he qualifies as "irreversible" regarding the performance of the current government. "Never has any other government in our history impoverished the majority of the Cuban population so structurally and materially as a direct result of its failed actions and decisions, the inconsistency, variability, and improvisation of its policies, and its inability to devise any strategy for success other than maintaining a monopoly on power for as long as possible," he writes.
In that logic, González García identifies a contradiction he considers irreconcilable: by excluding, persecuting, and punishing those who attempt to generate diverse political thought and action, the regime has destroyed the legitimacy that would support it. He sums it up in a phrase: "In its success lies its failure."
The jurist rejects interpretations that describe the Cuban situation as a “political survival” or a “diversified crisis.” For him, the precise term is different: “Some affirm a process of political survival, while others characterize existence in Cuba as a diversified, multiple crisis with internal and external variables, but perhaps it is neither of those, at least not absolutely; it is decay.” He clarifies: “It has become the decay of a society, of a civilizational model, but above all, of the political model that was once implemented to escape underdevelopment.”
This publication is part of a series of statements that González García has made throughout 2026. On September 20th, he diagnosed a structural and irreversible disconnection between the regime and the citizenry. On September 11th, he denounced a "historical betrayal" of the Cuban people, evoking starving children and elderly individuals without dreams. In August, he coined the term "political indigence" to describe the exclusion of the majority, and in July, he stated that Cubans have fewer political freedoms today than in 1953, under Batista's dictatorship.
The context in which they write is one of unprecedented structural crisis. The Cuban Observatory of Human Rights estimated in August 2026 that extreme poverty affects 94% of Cubans —nine points higher than in 2025— taking a threshold of $1.90 per day per person. Prisoners Defenders documented 1,339 political prisoners as of the end of August. CEPAL projects a decline in the Cuban GDP of 6.5% in 2026.
González García was removed from his position at the Universidad de Oriente in November 2016, after publishing critical articles in independent media; he and human rights organizations denounced it as political retaliation. Since then, he has been sharing his reflections under the hashtag #PensarEnCuba. His most recent text concludes with a statement that serves both as a diagnosis and a program: "There is only one way out of this: it is political."
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