Alberto Reyes Pias, the Roman Catholic parish priest of the Archdiocese of Camagüey, has delivered the following strong condemnation of Cuba’s leaders. [1]
“My words are not a cry of violence, they are not an aggressive outburst. They are simply the expression of my most serene and deepest feelings, and from there I want to say only this: ‘Go away, please, go away.’”
“You are not going to revive this country, you are not going to remedy the fuel shortage, nor the precariousness of the thermoelectric plants, nor are you going to give us back a life without continuous blackouts. You are not going to solve the hunger of this people, nor are you going to make the days stop being a continuous struggle for survival. You are not going to solve the monetary problem, nor inflation, nor the miserable life of the people.”
“The Cuban rulers “will never guarantee the health of the population, nor access to necessary medicines. Nor are they capable of preventing the deterioration of chronically ill patients, nor deaths due to the shortage of basic supplies, and they will also not be able to “repair the educational damage of this land, the deterioration of the educational system, the lack of competent teachers, and in many cases not even the lack of teachers at all.”
“You are not capable of stopping the galloping and unstoppable emigration of this people, you cannot prevent Cuba from continuing to be an island in flight, leaving behind the loss of its young people and the aging of the country, family breakups with wounds that will never heal, the loneliness of parents and grandparents, the loss of those who could have built a prosperous country here. You will never again be the sign of hope, of the desirable future, of the illusion that leads one to give one’s life.”
“Anchored in their control of power, they have turned this Island into a rudderless ship, where no one knows where it is going, where life is increasingly uncertain, where everything fades away and dies. Therefore, please, go, take everything you want and abandon this country forever. And do it before, somehow, things change and you can be judged, accused of crimes against humanity, because what you have done and are doing to this people is a silent genocide.”
“Leave, before this people reaches the end of its endurance and rises with uncontrollable fury, and consumes the end of this system, razing with blood and fire everything in its path. Because every day without light, without water, without food, every day with your children’s food spoiled, with the omnipresent scarcity and the broken desire for freedom, is a call that you make to the blindest and most excessive violence. I beg you, leave. Live where you want and can, so that we can live too.”
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[1] Priest Alberto Reyes to those who govern Cuba: ‘Go away, so that we can live,’ Diario de Cuba (Oct. 7, 2024).
