The singer-songwriter and officialist deputy Raúl Torres published this Saturday on his Facebook profile a poem about the Cuban diaspora in which he describes his fellow countrymen as "shattered hearts" and "torn hearts," scattered across various cities and countries: Panama, New York, Mexico, Paris, the Dominican Republic...
The text explores the musical genres of the island—son, chachachá, mambo, danzón, guaracha, changüí, guaguancó, and timba—as metaphors for a wounded and scattered people. Until that point, it is very moving.
The problem, of course, is that Torres has been a deputy in the National Assembly of the People's Power for years, the same one-party parliament that has been unanimously approving the policies that led to precisely that dispersion for decades. But the troubadour has a solution for this discomfort: "Today I don't want to talk about blame," he writes, with the elegance of someone who signs a check and then laments that the bank is bankrupt.
The poem closes with the line "With homeland but without master," a phrase that, spoken by any other Cuban, would resonate as a cry for freedom. However, coming from someone who has dedicated songs to Fidel Castro ("Riding with Fidel"), Raúl Castro ("The Last Mambí"), and Hugo Chávez ("The Return of the Friend"), it instead sounds more like an oxymoron with a guitar.
The phrase "Today I don't want to talk about blame" is not poetic generosity; it is a political stance. It means, translated from lyrical to plain Spanish, that the system that produced the exodus does not deserve to be named. And the system appreciates the favor. While Torres writes verse, according to the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), 317,320 people emigrated from Cuba in 2025, while 72,056 immigrations were recorded, resulting in a negative migration balance of 245,264 inhabitants.
The magnitude of the exodus is even greater when considering the accumulated period: a study by the Council on Foreign Relations, published in September 2026, estimates that between 1.6 and 2.75 million Cubans have left the island since 2020, based on calculations using official data and independent estimates from demographer Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos.
These are the "Cuban heartbeats" that, according to the poem, "must find the path / that enhances the human being." The path, it seems, involves not asking why they had to leave. Hunger, blackouts, the lack of freedoms, and the endless economic crisis could hold the answer.
It is not the first time that Torres has practiced this literary genre that could be called "the elegy without a culprit." In August, he admitted that the people were "drawing their last breath" and proposed raising jicoteas, water buffalo, and jutías to resolve the food crisis. In September, he defended Cuban socialism as a system "in the desert, biting the dust," but a system nonetheless. Just a few days ago, he held the "haters" responsible for the crisis, describing Cuba as "aged, weak, and impoverished." The pattern is always the same: acknowledging the disaster with metaphors, avoiding naming the responsible party, and concluding with a slogan or a call for unity.
"We are entertained / digging in our chests / to tear out our hearts... / leaving them scattered," writes Torres at the end of one of his stanzas. An unintentionally accurate description of what the regime he belongs to has been doing for decades, with the difference being that the regime does not put it into verse.
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