Priest Lester Zayas’s car was vandalized, and a photo taken at the nursing home of nun Nadieska Almeida was manipulated.
14ymedio, Havana, June 9, 2025 — “I don’t think, I don’t hope, I don’t see anything of value in the revolution. So many lies, so many ways to crush my people, so many deceptive promises”. These are the words expressed this Monday by the Mother Superior of the Daughters of Charity in Cuba, Nadieska Almeida, days after receiving a visit from government officials at the nursing home where she works.
According to her post on Facebook, the government visit -“mandatory for the subsidy that is given to all nursing homes for the elderly and hospitals”- was normal. “I do not object; it’s simple: there is nothing to hide and much to express, because the elderly are also suffering the hardships that the country is going through, with the aggravating factor that many lack the human warmth of their family, which no one can replace,” she explains. They are meetings, she continues, that “at least serve to tell someone truths, without fear, face to face and with respect, although as it usually happens, nothing is resolved”.
Something extraordinary happened afterwards. At the meeting, the authorities asked to take a photo and the nun agreed. However, days later she received “the surprise that, without permission, they had put her on social networks with the following caption: ’United for a revolutionary ideal’. This caused Almeida “much annoyance, as one would expect”, and it was what drove her to write her text and lash out against the Revolution.
“How can I believe in a project that continues to claim the lives of young people who are forced into military service? How can we believe them when they want to silence the crying from hunger of our children and old people”?
“How can I believe in a project that continues to claim the lives of young people who are forced into military service? How can we believe them when they want to silence the crying from hunger of our children and old people? How can we believe them when they once again plunge us into isolation, disconnection, when they shamelessly lie to us and insult the intelligence of an entire people with prices that are unattainable for many?” she says, in clear allusion to the phone and internet price increases (tarifazo) of Etecsa. “How do they expect us to work together if they are able to threaten to remove the subsidy if anyone disagrees? How can we believe right now that our young students are being threatened for claiming their rights and those of the people”?
Sister Nadieska is blunt: “No, the Revolution is not an ideal. It’s a failure; it’s a guillotine that is killing us year after year; it’s a circus where you can be a puppet that will later be kept in a miserable trunk because they have already squeezed out the last of your energy. Walking through our streets we see so many combatants who say with pain: ’I fought for this and they have abandoned me”. They dare not even pronounce the name. What can we expect? A project that is leading us more and more to misery: almost permanent darkness, coal, slow death, suffering and despair”.
Invoking the Gospel to offer hope and encouraging to people “to seek and trust in divine companionship”, she also urges them to “not be silent”. With “respect for those who continue to believe in the project”, she states that “the regression of these almost 66 years should lead them to think that it is now the time to let others propose a truly democratic State, one of justice and rights”. And she concludes, quoting the late opponent Oswaldo Payá: “The night weighs on us enough to have the courage of a mambí [independence fighter] and tell them once and for all that the night will not be eternal”.
The Mother Superior’s publication takes place a few days after the priest Lester Zayas reported the break-in of his vehicle. “It is true that coincidences exist, but do they always happen at the same time? So our car looked like this today after a long night of blackouts throughout El Vedado, right in front of our convent”, wrote the Havana priest on June 3.
He illustrated the publication with an image of the vehicle with a broken window and part of the radio destroyed. He offered poverty as the first explanation but then let it be understood that the “vandalism” could actually be “a form of revenge against some people for expressing a common feeling”.
The priest was referring to a long article he wrote and published the day after president Miguel Díaz-Canel appeared in a new edition of his podcast to offer explanations for the blackouts. Faithful to his ironic style, Zayas expressed his amazement at the lack of a “good advisor” to the leader of the island.
Point by point, the priest reviewed the arguments put forward by Díaz-Canel, which he calls a “grotesque, ugly and unacceptable mockery”
“It has been absolutely disturbing to me to see a ruler – the one of my country – standing in front of thousands of spectators (and I say thousands, because others, lacking electricity, couldn’t watch, and some no longer turn on the television), addressing the people, blaming them for what, in no way, can be their fault,” he said. “Have thermoelectric power plants in Cuba been privately owned? Have they been in the hands of the MSMEs? Have they been owned by the people”?
These were rhetorical questions, which preceded a harsh reprimand to the president-designate, to whom he addressed these words: “It is the State that you represent that is solely guilty for the energy failure. If you want to blame the embargo, blame it. But the sole responsibility for dialogue with those who have imposed the embargo, and negotiation, agreement and reaching solutions, is yours and the Government you represent”.
Point by point, the priest reviewed the arguments put forward by Díaz-Canel, which he calls “grotesque, ugly and unacceptable mockery”. “What do you and those who advise you intend to do? When the electricity comes on, should we continue to cook with coal so as not to overload the SEN [national electricity system]? Should we not take advantage to run the water that for months doesn’t arrive in many places? Should we stay in darkness and without fans? Do those who advise you know that when they turn on the power at dawn, people get up at that time to cook, wash, and carry out household tasks which, until then, are impossible and inhuman to carry out”?
“Tell your advisers to get into the car of the head of the American Embassy, invite him to go for a drink and learn together how the people really live”
Stating, as the president did, that electricity consumption goes up at noon and that it wasn’t that way before “shows an immense lack of respect for the people. Consumption will always rise at the time you put on the power, after 19, 25, 30 hours of blackout”.
And he recited a litany of things that shouldn’t be asked of Cubans, who are wrapped in suffering, such as that they should “continue cooking with coal”, whose price is 1,500 Cuban pesos a bag; or that the “elderly people with bedsores, in poorly ventilated rooms and without electricity continue resisting”; or that mothers “look elsewhere when they see the lives of their children languishing without even being able to put cartoons on the television, so that at least they can forget the hunger of their empty stomachs”; or telling the young people to “hold on and give up their lives in the name of an ideology that they did not choose, that they only inherited and about which they have not been consulted as to whether or not they want it”.
Similarly, the priest finds it intolerable “to criminalize the legitimate right to protest because there is no food, because there is no current, because every day there is less”, as well as calling anyone who cries out “food” and “freedom” a “criminal”.
He also has words for the regime’s criticism of Mike Hammer, head of mission of the United States Embassy in Cuba, who persists in his intention to visit every corner of the island and listen to ordinary citizens. “You can’t condemn an ordinary official for doing what all the Party cadres should be doing: mingling with the people; having a dialogue with the people; learning how they feel; even joining the protests of the people; because in principle, they too are the people and should know and feel the same as those who protest”.
Except, he adds, “that it can’t happen because then they would no longer be authentic representatives of the people”. Thus, he recommends: “Tell your advisers to get into the car of the head of the American Embassy, invite him to go for a drink, and then learn together how the people really live: the reality, not what you see on the news”.
Doing that, he concludes, “they would have realized how absolutely unpopular and ill-advised Etecsa’s new rates have been. Don’t your advisers know what the people earn? Don’t they know that the data package is the only way for thousands of elderly mothers to see their children’s faces? Do those who advise him not know that such measures only increase the pain of remoteness and frustration of those who, separated by distance, have no other means to feel close? Don’t they know how much joy they snatch through a video call, how many ’Dad, I love you!’, ’Mom, I miss you!’s have been ended?” Zayas continues.
The text concludes by stating that the Cuban people “want to obtain the legitimate right to eat with dignity, to have 24 hours of electricity, to speak freely, to be consulted about what they want and desire, to not be afraid to protest if it is necessary, with the dignity that characterizes us, if we feel that we are mocked or denied”. If the present leadership cannot permit this, Zayas urges them to leave “someone else in charge” so that “our people can still be saved”.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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