The Cuban researcher and essayist Hilda Landrove published on Friday in Rialta Magazine the essay "Cuba: the macabre face of resistance", an analysis that dismantles the propaganda use of the term "resistance" by the Cuban ruling elite and intellectuals aligned with the regime.
Landrove, a doctor in Mesoamerican Studies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a professor at the Monterrey Institute of Technology in Querétaro, opens the text with a sharp statement: “Resistance is one of those terms that I have ultimately tossed into the recycling bin.”
The starting point of the analysis is a personal anecdote: the words of a deceased loved one who waited too long on an empty stomach for a medical exam. The phrase that this relative uttered—"These bastards have taught us to endure the unbearable"—serves the author to illustrate how the regime has turned resistance into a condition: "one resists for the sake of resisting, because there is no alternative," she writes, without any further project or horizon to direct efforts toward.
Landrove contrasts this Cuban use with two alternative concepts: "reexistence"—a term derived from studies on indigenous and Afro-descendant communities that implies reinventing a way of being worthy of life—and "resilience," understood as individual generative adaptation. He argues that neither describes what happens in Cuba, where resistance serves the leadership to evade responsibility for the suffering of the people, attributing all causality to imperialism and the embargo.
The author describes the Cuban leadership as a "parasitic elite that has consumed everything and killed everything," and points out that the notion of "creative resistance" —a slogan coined by Miguel Díaz-Canel— is "probably the only linguistic contribution (and not necessarily conceptual) that [the leader] has made to his self-declared intention of being continuity."
The contrast drawn is revealing: in June, during the Plenary of the Communist Party, Díaz-Canel acknowledged that "today resistance alone is not enough," only to later state, in an interview with the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo, that Cuba was not in collapse precisely because of that same "creative resistance."
The essay also targets the regime's international supporters, accusing them of basing their enthusiasm around an abstraction "that has no people inside it." As an example, it cites a statement from someone in Mexico: "Cuba has to resist, because for me, Cuba is a symbol we cannot relinquish." In response, Landrove concludes: "Those who resist actually do not exist for those who demand them as part of the narrative of the invincible revolution."
This essay is part of a sustained trajectory of critical analysis throughout 2026. In July, Landrove described Cuba as "a concentration camp"; in September denounced those who defend the dictatorship as "accomplices of our oppressors"; and in June had characterized the economic reforms of Díaz-Canel as promises that come "poorly and late," arguing that "the system is not reformable."
The text is published amidst an unprecedented humanitarian crisis: Cuba is expected to experience the worst economic decline in Latin America in 2026, with a contraction of 10.3%, according to estimates by CEPAL. The deficits in electricity generation frequently exceed 2,000 MW, and the country has endured eight national collapses of the National Electric System so far in 2026. In terms of repression, Prisoners Defenders documented 1,372 political prisoners as of October 1st, including minors.
Landrove concludes the essay with a statement of collective weariness: "The resistors are fed up; pleading, both out of compassion and for justice, for that long night of totalitarianism to end, so that they can finally live without paying the price of an abstraction that has already caused too much sorrow."
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