At the beginning of 2025, the explosion in Holguín has gotten in the way of so much paraphernalia
14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Generation Y, Havana, 8 January 2025 — Lovers of ritual, and anchored to symbolic acts, dictatorships are given to organizing ahead of time and in a rigid manner a script of celebrations, public events and media coverage on anniversaries and founding dates. Nothing can make them deviate from this protocol projected to aggrandize their power and show themselves eternal. Every January, in Cuba, the same tiresome sequence of commemorations, caravans of freedom and official evocations of that January of 1959 when Fidel Castro took power on the Island is repeated. But at the beginning of 2025, tragedy has gotten in the way of so much paraphernalia.
Throughout Tuesday, Cubans have been following the news that, in dribs and drabs, came out from the vicinity of the weapons and ammunition warehouse in the community of Melones, belonging to the municipality of Rafael Freyre, in Holguín. In the military enclave, a series of explosions put the neighbors on alert and forced the Ministry of the Armed Forces to publish a note in which it limited itself to briefly reporting the explosions. As the day progressed and the testimonies and images taken by residents in the area reached the social networks, concern grew that the incident was much more serious than the authorities admitted and that it was far from being controlled.
Shortly afterwards, the number of 13 people missing at the military base began to be mentioned in the streets, but the official press continued to give priority to the events planned to commemorate the January 1959 anniversary. Nothing could interrupt what was planned for the day: showing a smiling Miguel Díaz-Canel surrounded by young communists in La Plata, echoing the ceremony for the anniversary of the National Revolutionary Police and closely following the pathetic caravan that travels through the provinces, imitating the route that the bearded men in olive green made 66 years ago.
The drama had no place in this scheme of self-satisfaction. The possible victims of the explosions did not fit into the operetta created to boast of having controlled a country and its millions of inhabitants for more than six decades, of having completely destroyed the economy of a nation and having forced hundreds of thousands of its children into exile. Nothing could tarnish the days of festivities. Therefore, the update on the incident and the names of the missing officers and soldiers were relegated to the end of the main newscast and as for President Díaz-Canel, it took him almost 24 hours to make a mention of what happened on his social networks.
But tragedy does not choose the time or the place, even though it seems to have been infatuated in these lands for years.
But tragedy does not choose the time or the place, even if it seems to have been infatuated in these lands for years. The analogies are inevitable. The pain of those days of the fire at the Supertankers in Matanzas is repeated, the collective affliction left by the explosion at the Saratoga hotel and the terrifying images of a crashed plane near Havana airport that claimed 112 lives. Once again, suffering is installed in Cuban homes and secrecy tries to hide it, to reduce it to a mere incident that does not deserve the major front pages or the first minutes of the news.
Dictatorships cannot stand desolation ruining their celebration, or the suffering of others forcing them to cut short long-planned celebrations.
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