Cuban Socialism: Struggling in the Desert, Says Raúl Torres

On Friday, Raúl Torres, a songwriter and pro-regime legislator, took to Facebook to share a post titled "Don't Confuse the Altar with the Crypt. Part 1," where he staunchly defends Cuban socialism as a system struggling to survive rather than admitting defeat. With his characteristic blend of lyrical prose and political slogans, Torres offers a philosophical defense of the disaster brought about by 67 years of communist dictatorship.

The piece begins with a confession that reads like an epitaph: "I cannot deny the evidence, because evidence is a mirror reflecting a weary, wounded, sometimes unrecognizable face back at us." From there, Torres employs medical and nautical metaphors to justify why the regime has reluctantly embraced elements it claims to despise.

"Cuba has not adopted bits of capitalism out of conviction; it has been injected in controlled doses to prevent the total collapse of the socialist organism," he asserts, with the solemnity of someone discovering penicillin. This distinction might seem vague to Cubans who have long struggled to afford a pound of rice, which now costs over 300 pesos on the informal market.

Torres openly acknowledges the presence of "new millionaires, exclusive clubs, and private schools," labeling them as "the gangrene of capitalism." But he quickly assumes the role of an emergency surgeon: "Amputate the leg, mourn the loss, and save the life. That's what we're doing: cutting away pieces of our utopia to ensure it doesn't die on the operating table." The issue is that the patient has been on the table for decades, and the surgeons continue to weep while collecting foreign currency.

Navigating Troubled Waters

The nautical metaphor doesn't fall short: "We are a socialist ship forced to sail in capitalist waters. To avoid sinking, we've had to jettison part of our cargo overboard. We've thrown 'the piano and some dreams'." What Torres fails to mention is that, along with the piano, they also discarded electricity: blackouts exceed 20 hours a day in many areas, with power generation deficits often surpassing 2,000 MW.

The troubadour even describes the survival of the party's bureaucracy as a "miracle": "that administrative skeleton is the only bulwark preventing the neoliberal tide from erasing this people's historical memory." The fact that this skeleton has led to an economic contraction exceeding 15% since 2020 is a detail he chooses to overlook.

The Cost of Foreign Currency

Regarding money flowing from abroad, Torres is blunt: "We don't celebrate the arrival of dirty money. We manage it with disgust, but we manage it, because a dead man manages nothing." Translated to everyday Cuban terms: the regime accepts the dollars from the diaspora—this same diaspora that has fled the revolution en masse—with a pinched nose but an open hand.

This text is part of a well-documented saga from the necro-troubadour. On August 16, Torres admitted that "the people are there giving their last breath," and the next day suggested raising turtles, water buffalo, and hutias to solve the food crisis. On August 21, he published a poem defending the ICAP and its officials sanctioned by Washington. The pattern is always the same: acknowledge the disaster, blame the "Empire," and end with a slogan.

And what a conclusion. Torres closes with a twist on the classic "Patria o Muerte" that inadvertently reveals the exhaustion of the moment: "Patria o Muerte. And if we must live, let it be!! We will overcome."

According to the National Food Security Survey "In Cuba There's Hunger 2025," conducted by the Food Monitor Program, 97.65% of surveyed households reported difficulties accessing essential products, while 33.9% stated that at least one member had gone to bed hungry due to a lack of food at some point during the previous 30 days. The study, conducted between May and July 2025, was presented in May 2026.

For these families, the question of whether to live is neither rhetorical nor poetic: it is the agonizing question they face each night.