The regime chooses to repeat slogans and triumphalist speeches while thousands of Cubans lose their property and sink into helplessness.
LIMA, Peru – Cuban ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel lost his composure in front of one of the victims of Hurricane Melissa in eastern Cuba. According to what emerged this weekend in a video which is already going viral on social networks, the dictator was visiting the territories most damaged by the cyclone and was questioned by an affected woman.
The Castro leader was in the middle of a group of residents of El Cobre, repeating the usual official speech of state support and future recovery, when a woman spoke up: “We don’t have a bed,” she told Díaz-Canel.
“And I don’t have the money to give it to you now either!” the Cuban leader blurts out in a loud, exalted tone.
The video has generated indignation among Internet users on different platforms, evidencing the lack of responses from the Cuban dictatorship to the devastation caused in several provinces by the meteorological event at the end of October.
This exchange is in addition to another that transcended this weekend during Díaz-Canel’s visits in Santiago de Cuba, where a resident questioned the president about government abandonment and the lack of help for the victims in Guamuta.
The first reaction of the Cuban dictator was to question why the man was recording and if it was a direct one. “No one has gone there (…) the people of the neighborhood are carrying out the survey because there are houses on the floor with children,” denounced the man from Santiago.
Given the damage caused, the leaders’ lack of empathy has been highlighted as in past natural disasters. The regime chooses to repeat slogans and triumphalist speeches while thousands of Cubans lose their property and sink into helplessness.
While Díaz-Canel insisted on highlighting “organization” and “resilience” as key elements of the state response, the reality on the ground shows homeless families, flooded neighborhoods, impassable roads, collapsed electrical services and communities that survive mainly thanks to solidarity between neighbors and the support of relatives abroad, not to State institutions.
More than 70,000 homes affected
Days after Hurricane Melissa passed through eastern Cuba, the Cuban regime presented preliminary figures on the magnitude of the disaster, in a session of the National Defense Council broadcast by the official program Round Table and headed by Miguel Díaz-Canel. The information arrives late and only partially, while the situation in the affected provinces reveals a scenario of deep devastation and abandonment.
Official data indicates that at least 76,789 homes were damaged. Within that total, more than 4,700 homes were reduced to rubble and another more than 12,000 homes completely lost their roofs. In addition, more than 47,000 homes are registered with partial damage, a severe blow in a region where the housing stock had already been deteriorated by decades of abandonment and lack of maintenance.
The loss of crops will directly affect the already poor diet of the population in the coming months. In the agricultural sector, the hurricane devastated hundreds of thousands of hectares of crops, including areas intended for the production of basic foods and coffee plantations in the middle of the season. The loss not only affects immediate local supply, but also compromises the region’s productive capacity.
Regarding the electrical system, official reports recognize severe damage to the infrastructure, with more than a thousand poles downed and at least 279 transformers damaged, which left numerous communities without service for days and, in some cases, completely isolated.
However, the damage is not explained solely by the meteorological phenomenon. Decades of structural deterioration, lack of maintenance, unproductive policies and corruption have left eastern communities extremely vulnerable. Melissa only deepened the collapse of a country that was already in ruins.
