In fact, Marta Elena Feitó’s words reflect the official policy of denying poverty.
14ymedio, Madrid, 16 July 2025 — “The lack of sensitivity in addressing vulnerability is highly questionable. The Revolution cannot leave anyone behind; that is our motto, our militant responsibility.” President Miguel Díaz-Canel’s comment on his X account on Tuesday morning referred, without naming her, to the remarks made by Labor Minister Marta Elena Feitó before Parliament on Monday. His comment was the prelude to the official’s dismissal, made public a few hours later.
In a brief statement, the Ministry announced that Feitó was “released from her position” after the Party and the government “analyzed” the minister’s remarks at the meeting of two working committees of the National Assembly. During the meeting, she stated that in Cuba “there are no beggars,” but rather citizens “disguised as beggars.”
“La compañera acknowledged her mistakes and submitted her resignation,” the report says, adding that her dismissal—which was never referred to as such, but rather as “liberation”—resulted “from the lack of objectivity and sensitivity with which she addressed issues that are currently at the center of political and governmental management, focused on addressing real phenomena that our society never wanted.”
The dismissal arose “from the lack of objectivity and sensitivity with which she addressed issues that are central to current political and governmental management.”
Feitó had argued before the Permanent Commissions for the Assistance to Local Bodies of People’s Power and for Children, Youth, and Women’s Equality that those who roam the streets in precarious conditions do not suffer from extreme poverty, but rather opportunistically feign it. She called them “drunkards, deceivers, and illegals” and asserted that the role of the State is not to recognize structural poverty, but rather to “prevent social opportunism” and “combat it.” According to the minister, the social deterioration the country is experiencing is not explained by failures of the economic system, but by “individual selfishness” and a “lack of values.”
The minister said that those who clean windshields at traffic lights are not homeless, but rather “people who have found an easy way of life,” and even denied that hunger existed on the island: “Divers? No, divers are in the water. Those people in the garbage cans are looking for cans.” She added: “They’re not looking for food. That’s not true either. These are the patterns they’re trying to impose on us. They’re self-employed illegals who are violating the treasury.”
She offered no figures, plans, or solutions to address the precariousness affecting millions of Cubans, nor did she address the deteriorating pensions or the helplessness of thousands of retirees, much less the runaway inflation that has turned state salaries into a dead letter. Her remarks focused on rejecting the images of poverty circulating in independent media, reducing the phenomenon to “something out of the movies” or “a perception imposed from abroad.”
Johana Tablada expressed her “outrage” over “the insensitive, unacceptable, and condemnable statements made by a high-ranking official in my country.”
A wave of indignation immediately arose among Cubans both on and off the island. It was not limited to those typically critical of the regime, such as economist Pedro Monreal, who accused the minister of making “the most insolently reactionary speech of the current regime.” Although 24 hours late, the hand-picked president spoke out against the incident.
Johana Tablada, deputy director of the United States Directorate at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, also expressed her “outrage” at “the insensitive, unacceptable, and condemned statements made by a high-ranking official of my country.” In a lengthy commentary on Facebook, she alluded to Díaz-Canel’s opinion on social media and confessed: “I would like someone else to lead such a sensitive responsibility as Cuba’s Labor and Social Security. There are urgent, systemic, and important tasks that deserve the best.”
She then launches into a lengthy diatribe against government critics, suggesting they are subservient to the United States. “How sweet are those who make a post every 10 minutes pretending to care about poverty in Cuba but don’t speak out or criticize the atrocities there out of hypocrisy, fear, or complicity,” Tablada writes.
Alejandro Fernández Feitó, the son of the former minister, has been living in the US since last year, where he arrived thanks to humanitarian parole.
However, Tablada and the other officials had never until now criticized the numerous statements made by regime representatives against the “homeless,” such as those made by a high-ranking official in the Matanzas provincial government last May, which reflect the abandonment of the poor in a situation of profound social crisis.
Hypocrisy, precisely, is what is shown in the news revealed, also this Tuesday, by Martí Noticias journalist Mario Pentón: the son of the now former minister, Alejandro Fernández Feitó, has been living in the US since last year, where he arrived thanks to humanitarian parole, and is in the process of obtaining his residency through the Cuban Adjustment Act.
In his note, Pentón points to Fernández Feitó’s LinkedIn profile, which states that he worked in Cuba as an Information Technology Manager at the travel agency Cubatur, which belongs to the military conglomerate Gaesa, and that he was an engineer at DATYS, the state-owned company that produces digital certificates for the Ministry of the Interior, “where he participated in the development of reporting systems for border control on the island.”
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