Díaz-Canel gets tangled up in a quote about utopia in his eagerness to cover up the greatest setback in contemporary Cuba.
14ymedio, Yunior García Aguilera, Madrid, July 25, 2026 — Ever since his years leading the bureaucracy in Holguín, it was clear that Miguel Díaz-Canel was a failed leader. Farmers showed remarkable foresight when they nicknamed him “Díaz-Condom,” because he kept milk from entering the city. The theater company El Portazo also proved prophetic when, after his appointment as president, it dedicated the children’s song Little Mouse Miguel to him in Matanzas. One of its verses seems written to summarize these years of continuity: “Things are… so horrifying they truly inspire fear.”
Now memes have flooded social media over the mangled version the ruler made of a quote that, evidently, he did not even understand. In an interview with the Russian outlet RT, the sub-dictator tried to quote Eduardo Galeano, who in turn was repeating a reflection by Argentine filmmaker Fernando Birri. But Díaz-Canel’s version completely destroyed the meaning of utopia, as if the horizon itself had run away in terror from the monstrosity that was trying to reach it.
The blunder sparked ridicule because it came at the worst possible moment. It was uttered by the man who has spent eight years at the helm of a country where virtually everything has deteriorated dramatically. His government does not need to take two steps forward for utopia to move ten steps away. It only has to announce an “economic measure.”
With 134,354 deaths, 2025 was the second deadliest year since records have been kept, surpassed only by 2021, the year of covid
Díaz-Canel inherited a dictatorship that was already dystopian. He was handed a ruined system, that is true, but he has demonstrated an extraordinary talent for making every inherited ruin even worse. Under his rule, the Tarea Ordenamiento [Ordering Task] was implemented, presented as the great solution to the “distortions” accumulated over decades. The result was the pulverization of wages and pensions, runaway inflation, the devaluation of the peso, and the consolidation of a caste economy in which some shop in foreign currency while others are left staring through store windows.
The hardest year of the pandemic, despite all the propaganda surrounding Cuba’s vaccine candidates, produced the highest death toll in the official Cuban statistical series published since 1970. But death did not retreat with the coronavirus. In 2025 it struck Cubans once again, although almost no one in the official narrative wants to talk about it. With 134,354 deaths, it was the second deadliest year in that series, surpassed only by 2021, the year of Covid. Continuity has failed to multiply the loaves and the fishes, but it has succeeded in multiplying the corpses.
The greatest feat of so-called “creative resistance” has been to switch off the country. The national power grid has collapsed so many times that it now seems to come back online only long enough to gather momentum before crashing again. Tourism began to sink even before the new sanctions imposed by the Trump administration. And foreign companies are leaving not only because they fear Washington, but also because they are tired of dealing with a State that does not pay its debts, freezes funds, and changes the rules as easily as its bureaucrats change their guayaberas.
The regime no longer promises to achieve anything. It only asks people to walk backward like crabs, to resist and wait for nothing like zombies
But Díaz-Canel will not be remembered solely for his economic failures. When thousands of Cubans took to the streets on 11 July 2021, demanding freedom, food, and electricity, he did not react like a president but like the leader of a gang. That was when he uttered his most authentic phrase: “The combat order is given.” What followed were beatings, arrests, show trials, excessive prison sentences, and exile.
That day made it clear what he was there for. Raúl Castro did not put him in office because he was bold, but because he was obedient. He needed someone willing to destroy an entire country rather than endanger the ruling caste. Díaz-Canel is the civilian fuse of a military machine, the expendable face of a power structure that uses surnames with no history to protect the important surnames.
That is why the utopia quote was not just another intellectual lemon. It was a confession. The regime no longer promises to achieve anything. It only asks people to walk backward like crabs, to resist and wait for nothing like zombies. It offers no deadlines, no results, and no direction. Its only goal is to prolong obedience and resignation.
Fernando Birri spoke of utopia as a horizon that compels us to keep walking. Galeano turned that idea into one of his most widely quoted reflections. Díaz-Canel transformed it into the bureaucratic excuse for decline. For him, utopia serves to keep the people wandering without asking who walked away with their shoes.
And what is dystopia for? To govern without results. To justify every failure with the previous failure. To call resignation hope, misery resistance, and collapse continuity. To drive horizons away. And, above all, to allow a man incapable of correctly repeating a simple quote to continue presenting himself as the president of a country that never elected him.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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