After almost seven decades of promises, the problem is no longer the horizon, but the distance between official discourse and everyday life.
14ymedio, Havana, Generation Y, Yoani Sánchez, July 23, 2026 / Miguel Díaz-Canel tried to get philosophical. In a recent interview, he spoke about utopia and attempted to repeat a phrase popularized by Eduardo Galeano, which he didn’t even manage to quote correctly. He said that “utopia is on the horizon. When we take two steps forward, utopia takes two steps back. And the horizon moves ten steps forward.” A strange mix that ended up sounding more absurd than inspiring.
And yet, perhaps the most revealing thing is not that he muddled the quote. What is truly revealing is that, after almost seven decades of this regime, the country’s top leader continues to offer us a utopia instead of a reality.
I, sincerely, am already tired of utopias.
Not because I’ve stopped believing in a better country. On the contrary. Precisely because I want a better nation, I refuse to continue living within a dream that belongs to others.
We inhabit a utopia that is not our own. Some who don’t even experience it try to convince us, from a distance, that we must conserve it intact.
We inhabit a utopia that isn’t ours. Some who don’t even experience it try to convince us, from a distance, from an office, or from the comfort of their privilege, that we must conserve it intact. They ask us for resilience, sacrifice, and faith. But they aren’t the ones who spend entire nights without electricity, who have to walk miles because there’s no public transportation, or who have to bring even antibiotics when a family member is hospitalized. They aren’t the ones who have to choose between buying medicine or putting food on the table.
It is profoundly alienating to live within the illusion of another person. To carry for a whole life the weight of a dream we never chose. No one asked Cubans if we wanted to dedicate our lives to building that utopia. No one consulted us if we were willing to trade our youth for promises, our maturity for slogans, and our old age for speeches that always tell us the future will be better.
That future has been coming for almost seventy years.
And it never arrives.
Because the difference between a utopia and public policy is enormous. Public policy must produce results; it must ensure there is food, transportation, electricity, decent wages, functioning hospitals, and schools where teachers don’t abandon their classrooms. A utopia, on the other hand, always finds an excuse to postpone itself. It always lacks one more effort, there is always a little more resistance, always another step to take.
But while we walk toward that unattainable horizon, reality does the exact opposite: it regresses. The electrical system is deteriorating, transportation is decaying, and agriculture is shrinking. Hospitals are falling apart. The population is dwindling, with hundreds of thousands leaving the country. Even hope is fading.
Utopia can no longer be used as an argument to justify the persistent failure of a model. Because it is one thing to strive towards an ideal and another very different thing to use this idea to explain why even the most basic objectives are never achieved.
We don’t want to be governed by improvised philosophers. We want people capable of guaranteeing that there is running water, electricity at night, and food that can one can pay for with their wages. We want to live in a country where emigration isn’t the only option.
To those who imposed on us without consulting us, this mirage, we must say to them something very simple: : we do not want to live chasing what does not exist, what will never exist.
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