The Cuban government seems to have forgotten everything that got it where it is, along with its responsibilities. It appears to have forgotten the humble, the disabled, the unlucky, the left behind, the needy; it also seems to have forgotten the intellectuals, the teachers, the scientists, the artists, the athletes…. In fact, the government gives the impression that it’s not listening to anyone.

It’s not true there’s no dialogue – the people speak to the government in thousands of ways. There are many ways they attempt to dialogue with their government. That the government doesn’t want to listen is another thing altogether. That the government pretends that nothing is happening and that no one is questioning it is another thing.

The poor speak to the government with their rags while they dig through the garbage for something to eat; when they beg on the street; when they die from heatstroke, hunger and neglect.

People of all ages who are emigrating by the thousands and have left the Cuban streets half-deserted are speaking to the Cuban government; these migrants who have left their homes and scarce belongings to escape to anywhere else are speaking to a Cuban government that knows what is going on and doesn’t want to listen.

The government calls the poor and homeless with nothing to carry, “people who drift”; they say that the choice to beg defaces our society. If that’s a socialist government, then I’m a cosmonaut.

The Cuban government calls the people who are leaving the country by the thousands, “emigrants for economic reasons,” or “people we don’t need.” At other times, they’ve called them “scum,” but never has that government wanted to recognize that it’s a people trying to talk to them, a population telling them in many ways that things aren’t going well for them.

Couples speak to the Cuban government when they don’t want to have children in Cuba; the teenagers are speaking when they don’t want to study in the university; it’s a message when the only ones surviving are those who receive family remittances from outside the country. People are speaking when tourists don’t come to our majestic and empty hotels, when there is ever less participation in the elections of any kind and ever more ballots are left blank and annulled; and when the percentage of members in the Communist Youth who want to “grow up” to be part of the Cuban Communist Party falls lower and lower.

Now, the university students are speaking. They’ve shown their faces and have put their bodies on the line for themselves and the Cuban people – students of different disciplines from different provinces around the country. The University of Havana has become once more the place where healthy disagreement flourishes (which should be regarded as something natural and part of the metabolism of society and the political system, but which the authoritarians never understand, recognize, or accept.)

The furor over the exaggerated prices charged by Etecsa [Cuba’s State Telecommunications Company] is the umpteenth proof that the Cuban government doesn’t listen – out of callousness, arrogance, and treachery.

The Cuban government, which defines itself as “leftist,” implements economic measures that neglect the impoverished social sectors, restrict political rights, because we’re in a “cultural war” against imperialism and “besieged on all sides” by the historic enemy. It doesn’t guarantee social rights like it did before, because these were “undue privileges” and we must advance towards “rationalization.” It invests more in hotels than in social services, because God is great and so is shamelessness.

A significant part of the Cuban university students have stood up against the injustice of this new restriction on rights, – theirs, and that of the thousands who the measure of a company excludes. A company that doesn’t do anything that the government hasn’t previously decided to do, and the Communist Party hasn’t also blessed.

The students and an honorable group from the faculty of the University of Havana Sociology Department are speaking to the Cuban government.

A government that didn’t listen to the people when they marched in July 2021; who didn’t listen to the citizens who sat down in front of the Ministry of Culture on November 27, 2020; who didn’t want to listen to those in the San Isidro protest; nor those who have sent thousands of letters pleading for justice for the political prisoners; nor to the people from all parts of Cuba who are protesting the lack of water, electricity and food.

Let me remind this government – as Julio Cesar Guanche, the old student leader and renowned professor and intellectual has reminded them in a beautiful and admirable Facebook post – that students are sacred in Cuba, or should be so, if the bureaucrats’ sensitivity could only stretch far enough to simply feel it.

The governments of authoritarian States don’t commit political errors. What they actually do is act in accordance with their nature. When the government of an authoritarian state (an undemocratic political regime within a political system with no pluralism) represses protest, criminalizes the right to demonstrate, persecutes freedom of association and expression, jails dissenters and distorts justice, what it’s doing is just being itself- not making mistakes, but simply expressing itself as it is.

In politics, the government of an authoritarian, totalitarian, and undemocratic government can assume the role of negotiator or be tolerant, when it suits them to do so.

We remind the Cuban government, in case they didn’t read carefully some of the above lines, that students are sacred in Cuba. The humble, the women, those discriminated against, the vulnerable, the intellectuals, the teachers, and all those who have worked their entire lives for the State that once upon a time called itself socialist, should also be considered sacred. But we know they’re not.

The Cuban people are on alert, because their university students have spoken. We are all with those who protest, demand and clamor for their rights. We’re with the students who have opted to act civically, at a time when this may seem too sluggish. We’re with the teachers, who won’t allow those students to be repressed.

Myself, the only job I’ve ever had was working as a university professor. I know every mark on the walls of the University of Havana. I know where the cool dawn breezes enter the Agramonte Plaza, and that Mella and Jose Antonio are still watching over those parks and gardens. I can do nothing else except feel myself with those students, with those professors, and suffer the pain of being so far away.

This article was translated into English from the original in Spanish.