While municipalities and towns in Cuba go without electricity for more than 20 hours a day, the Communist Party of Cuba was holding, as reported this Friday, a highly solemn event in Havana: the presentation of the 23 printed volumes of the Selected Works of Fidel Castro Ruz before the auxiliary structure of the Central Committee, with Miguel Díaz-Canel in the front row and Politburo member Roberto Morales Ojeda beside him.
The collection is indeed monumental on paper: 23 volumes, nearly 16,000 pages, 690 documents, and over 12,000 footnotes, featuring texts by Castro spanning from 1940 to 2016 and a preface signed by Raúl Castro; a colossal compendium of the words that governed Cuba and have led it to the predicament it faces today.
The 3,000 physical copies did not come from any Cuban printing house, but from Vietnam, where the Vietnamese Communist Party and its National Political Publishing House "La Verdad" —what an irony— were responsible for their production. Cuba simply does not have paper.
The Cuban Institute of the Book is experiencing an unprecedented crisis due to a lack of paper, ink, and funding. Since early March of this year, the newspapers Granma and Juventud Rebelde are only published on Tuesdays, in eight-page editions. Provincial newspapers have completely ceased to circulate in print format.
None of that dampened the official enthusiasm. Sissy Abay, deputy director of the Fidel Castro Center and in charge of the presentation, described the texts as something that "in their entirety constitute much more than a historical record. They are the roadmap of a national project that reinvents itself in the face of adversity and a manual of political strategy and leadership in times of crisis." She also defined them as "the chronicle of how a small island nation decided, against all odds, to take control of its destiny."
The destination in question, in November 2026, looks like this: a power deficit that frequently exceeds 2,000 MW daily; more than 2.6 million people without regular access to drinking water; and an official food inflation rate that surpassed 42% year-on-year in September.
To this situation, one must add the severe government difficulties in supplying liquefied gas, which has forced a large portion of the population to cook with charcoal—extremely expensive in the informal market—or with firewood.
The "nation project that centers around the human being," as proclaimed by the PCC in its official publication, coexists with a housing deficit that exceeds 800,000 homes, with nearly 1,000 buildings collapsing each year just in Havana, and with only 7,427 completed homes across the country during 2024. CEPAL projected a contraction of more than 10% of the Cuban GDP for this year, the worst in Latin America.
The event this Friday is part of the "Year of the Centennial of the Commander in Chief," declared by the regime in December 2025 to commemorate Castro's birth on August 13, 1926. The campaign included caravans, international colloquiums, and the slogan "Fidel is eternal," which in August sparked a wave of sarcastic responses on social media: Cubans associated eternity not with the leader, but with blackouts, shortages, and the bread lines. Official propaganda does not stop even as the country sinks.
The population of the island dropped to 9,434,593 inhabitants at the end of 2025 —313,414 fewer than the previous year, with 68,064 births compared to 136,214 deaths— and hundreds of political prisoners remain behind bars, according to estimates from independent organizations.
At least one thing is truly inexhaustible in Cuba: the willingness of the rulers to continue celebrating the "eternal legacy" of the greatest tyrant.
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