Madrid/Since his years at the head of the Holguín bureaucracy, it was known that Miguel Díaz-Canel was a failed leader. The peasants were skeptical when they baptized it Díaz-Condón, because it prevented milk from entering the city. Also premonitory was the El Portazo theater company, which, after his appointment as president, dedicated the children’s song to him in Matanzas. The little mouse Miguel. One of his verses seems written to summarize these years of continuity: “The thing is… that is truly horrifying and scary.”
Now memes have poured in due to the president’s rehashing of a phrase that, evidently, he did not even understand. In an interview with the Russian media RT, the subdictator wanted to quote Eduardo Galeano, who in turn reproduced a reflection by the Argentine filmmaker Fernando Birri. But the Canelista version completely destroyed the sense of utopia, as if the horizon began to run in terror before the aberration that tried to reach it.
The nonsense provoked ridicule because it came at the worst possible moment. It was spoken by the man who has been leading a country for eight years where practically everything has gone backwards in an overwhelming way. Your Government does not need to advance two steps for utopia to move ten steps away. It is enough for him to announce an “economic measure.”
With 134,354 deaths, 2025 was the second year with the most deaths since there were records, only behind 2021, the year of covid
Díaz-Canel inherited a dictatorship that was already dystopian. He was handed a ruined system, it is true, but he has demonstrated an extraordinary talent for making each ruin worse. Under his mandate, the Ordering Task was applied, presented as the great solution to the “distortions” accumulated over decades. The result was the collapse of salaries and pensions, rampant inflation, the devaluation of the peso and the consolidation of a caste economy, where some buy in foreign currency and others limit themselves to looking at the shop windows.
The hardest year of the pandemic, despite all the propaganda deployed around the vaccine candidates, left the highest number of deaths in the official Cuban series published since 1970. But death did not disappear with the coronavirus. In 2025 he attacked the Cubans again, although almost no one in the official discourse wants to talk about it. With 134,354 deaths, it was the second year with the most deaths in that series, only behind 2021, the year of covid. Continuity has not managed to multiply the loaves and fishes, but it has managed to multiply the corpses.
The greatest feat of the so-called “creative resistance” has been to shut down the country. The national electrical system has collapsed so many times that it seems to only be incorporated to gain momentum and fall again. Tourism began to sink even before the Trump Administration’s new sanctions. And foreign companies are not leaving only because they fear Washington, but also because they are tired of dealing with a State that does not pay its debts, that freezes funds and that changes the rules with the same ease with which its bureaucrats change their guayabera.
The regime no longer promises to achieve anything. Just ask to walk backwards, like crabs; resist and wait for nothing, like zombies
But Díaz-Canel will not be remembered only for his economic failures. When on July 11, 2021, thousands of Cubans came out to demand freedom, food and electricity, he did not react like a president, but like the leader of a gang. He then uttered his most authentic phrase: “The combat order is given.” Then came the beatings, the arrests, the exemplary trials, the excessive sentences and the exile.
That day it became clear what it was for. Raúl Castro did not put him in office because he was bold, but because he was obedient. He needed someone willing to destroy an entire country rather than endanger the caste. Díaz-Canel is the civilian fuse of a military machine, the expendable face of a power that uses surnames without history to protect important surnames.
That’s why the utopia thing was not just another intellectual lemonade. It was a confession. The regime no longer promises to achieve anything. Just ask to walk backwards, like crabs; resist and wait for nothing, like zombies. It does not offer dates, results or direction. Its only goal is to prolong obedience and resignation.
Birri spoke of utopia as a horizon that forces us to walk. Galeano turned that response into one of his most widespread quotes. Díaz-Canel transformed it into the bureaucratic alibi for the setback. For him, utopia is for the people to wander around without asking who kept their shoes.
And what is dystopia for? To govern without results. To justify each failure with the previous failure. To call hope to resignation, resistance to misery and continuity to collapse. To scare horizons. And, above all, so that a man incapable of correctly repeating a simple quote can continue presenting himself as president of a country that never elected him.
