Perhaps the claim began at a stop when someone compared the lack of buses with the line of buses that would be seen on May 1st. Then the demand jumped to the patient who waited for hours for an ambulance but in the hospital he heard the call to fill the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana on Workers’ Day and it infected that retiree who spent half board in a taxi, to attend to a notarial procedure. The chorus became almost unanimous: “How are they going to have a parade if there isn’t even gasoline for the hearses!”
Showing that you have the convening power and political muscle to transport thousands of people is one thing, but materializing this bath of crowds implies complex logistics: the little revolutionary enthusiasm that remains among the Cuban workers must be stirred up, the fuel necessary to transfer them to the main squares of each province and deploy a propaganda apparatus that takes to those places from cameramen to announcers, all of them thirsty for water, snacks, credit on their mobile phones and some other perks.
Until a few days ago it seemed that this authoritarian choreography was going to happen, despite the deep crisis we are experiencing. An event that on this Island has nothing to do with the proletarian date designed for demand and protest, because here decades ago it was tamed and transmuted into an act of support for a regime led by leaders of the Communist Party who have never sweated in a industry, they haven’t counted the pennies to make ends meet and they don’t know the bitter taste that a devalued currency and galloping inflation leaves on their plates.
Falsifying the results of an electoral process requires the complicity of hundreds of officials, but to show a crowd where there is none, more than artificial intelligence is needed
They were going, as so many times in the past, to spend on a day of self-promotion what little we have left in this nation where universities cancel their face-to-face classes, people avoid making plans that involve moving to another municipality and fights break out in families to blows for the few liters of diesel that the grandfather has saved in a drum. This was going to be another year, like the many of us who live under the delusional imprint of Fidel Castro, in which the photo from the rostrum was more important than the day after with his patients urgently needed to move, his deceased waiting to be cremated and their children waiting to get to school.
Why was the pragmatic decision to cancel the great parade and break it up into smaller acts imposed then? The hydrocarbon crisis does not seem to be the only cause for this decision. The old panic of a parade without the hundreds of thousands that managed to summon-coerce in the past may be among the reasons. Falsifying the results of an electoral process requires the complicity of hundreds of officials, but to show a crowd where there is none, more than artificial intelligence is needed. Any photographic or propaganda trick can be quickly contrasted and dismantled in these times.
It was not only the lack of oil that caused the suspension of the parade in Havana. With this change of scenery and by lowering the importance of the commemoration by various degrees, the Cuban regime is making it clear that it has already turned the page of showing itself supported by the people, respected by the workers and applauded for its advances in social justice. .
The crude dictatorships do not even need crowd baths. They do not have to be charismatic or have easy verb speakers or mythical profiles. Miguel Díaz-Canel’s second term began just a few days ago, but he has already defined his fundamental lines: to survive at any cost clinging to power, even if he loses the few collectivist garments he had left along the way.
Castroism no longer needs to smile for the cameras having behind that sculpture of a José Martí so sad that it makes you want not to look. We are in times of absolute imposition and terror. Why do you need a parade?
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