The Cuban state left the country. I don’t know if it took the opportunity to stay with some sports delegation at a competition somewhere or if it dared to endure the odyssey of volcanoes and jungles, or if it abandoned a medical mission in Africa or South America. However, I know it didn’t leave on a raft because it hasn’t been sent back. It left, and it didn’t say goodbye.

The Cuban state used to own everything, control everything, administer everything. It had the industries, the street food carts, the pharmacies for Cubans with empty shelves and the international ones full of medicine for the wealthy. It had the sports centers inherited from capitalism and the ones built after 1959. It owned the hospitals, the schools, the amusement parks, the hotels, the stores selling all types of goods, the mines of every mineral, the cinemas, the theaters, and the tents of traveling circuses.

The state, while it could and even after it couldn’t, owned all the taxis, all the urban and interprovincial buses, all the trains, all the boats, and even the Chinese bicycles it sold or gave away in the 1990s.

Additionally, it owned 100% of electricity generation, all water pumping, and waste collection —not to mention its absolute ownership, shared only with foreign investors about whom we are never consulted— of all of Cuba’s oil and natural gas.

The state has owned all the banks, while also maintaining ownership of much of Cuba’s arable land. It was also the owner of the flora and fauna, deciding when to export or add invasive species as it saw fit. It owned all the houses people lived in, with titles marked “basic means or usufruct,” as well as the colonial-era fortresses, where it decided to install —at its convenience— tourist centers, museums, book fairs, military units, and restaurants.

The Cuban state owned all the news, television, and every newspaper —always directed by the immortal Communist Party— every printing press, every museum, and every library. For decades, it decided which films could be made and which could not, what could be danced, performed, acted, painted, sculpted, animated, and sung.

It was an all-powerful state, and when it realized it couldn’t handle everything because it had no means to sustain it, it first resisted without protecting, without caring, without restoring, without cleaning, without preserving, without registering, without treasuring, without showing the least interest as a true owner. Then it abandoned everything, little by little, sometimes abruptly.

During all the time the state was so powerful, it declared, published, and recited that the owner of all things human and divine was the people.

I won’t write more than one sentence on this subject because Cubans know we have never been owners of anything, administrators of anything, possessors of anything, holders of anything. We’ve merely been users of a few goods and services, most of which were burdens rather than benefits.

After owning everything, the Cuban state reluctantly allowed some people to sell peanuts on the streets, and sometimes it would remember that even peanuts are state-owned and would confiscate the cones carried by the elderly in their meager bags.

The state allowed some people to have rental cars, but then made their lives miserable with constant restrictive measures, because for someone who once owned everything, seeing people driving tourists in classic American convertibles must be hard to process.

Now, the state is nowhere to be found. Someone is pretending to be the state in public and secret State Security offices, which have long been more about the security of the government and the Communist Party because the state left, it’s no longer here, and the people working for State Security know it.

The state has left public health to the patients, who must bring everything they need to the hospital, including the doctor’s salary in the form of goods or money, because everyone knows that what doctors and nurses do isn’t paid with the salary the state claims to give them each month.

In general, the state has left the salaries of public workplaces to the families living abroad, who, through remittances —those who can— keep the state’s inefficiency afloat, allowing their relatives to survive.

The state has abandoned education. There are no teachers, over 24,000 are missing to cover the school year that just started. It doesn’t have the resources to provide lunches and snacks or maintain thousands of classrooms in a country with nothing.

The state abandoned the sugarcane fields and turned hundreds of sugar mills into scrap metal, pasta factories, or warehouses. For decades, it left fertile land go fallow, swimming pools to mosquitoes, stadium bleachers to salt air, museums to dust, libraries to moths, old films to the heat, and cinemas, if lucky, to the determination of some artistic collective.

The ships of the Cuban Fishing Fleet were lost because they couldn’t sail. It wasn’t one, two, three, four, five, or six weeks, they stayed grounded for a lifetime, and young people don’t even know we once had a brand called Reina del Caribe and Cuban cans of bonito in chunks and fritters.

The state abandoned transportation, the road network, and unique architectural buildings. Today, it’s impossible to travel within cities, from one province to another, and the crumbling buildings, empty or inhabited, collapse as if their fall were inevitable.

People living in Cuba know that the state is incapable of generating electricity, though it’s good at generating blackouts, which isn’t the same but is related. Likewise, the state can’t provide potable water to hundreds of thousands of people who must survive day by day, hoping for a tanker truck, known in Cuba as a pipa, to bring a bit of water to the community. Water that’s never enough and is just an insufficient palliative.

Garbage collection, which has never been a resolved issue —at least in Havana— is now left to flies, disease, and rot.

The state left food provision to small private enterprises, but these sell products at prices only affordable to consumers receiving remittances in foreign currencies. The Ration Booklet —allow me to capitalize it one last time— in effect no longer exists, and the democratic and socialist state didn’t hold a plebiscite to consult the people about this decision.

The Cuban state has left internal security to the fear people feel about going out into the streets. It has left the people’s hopes and happiness to their dreams and the real possibility of emigrating. It has left the recording of femicides to Cuban civil society and reports on the truth of the streets to independent media, which, for reporting the news the state can’t or won’t report, are labeled as traitors and mercenaries.

The state left. It owned everything, including us. At one point, it called us “basic means of the Revolution.” It decided where and what we should study to help it own everything forever, and yet it hasn’t been able to stop millions of people from escaping its arrogance and decay, even if only to be poor somewhere else.

The Cuban state left the country. It abandoned it. It has left us with a government without a people, without public celebrations, without carnivals, without patriotic fireworks or jingoism. It took its delusions of grandeur elsewhere and left us with a frustrated, mediocre government.

The Cuban state has left everything to the passage of time and to our material and spiritual poverty. When it had nothing left to abandon, it decided to also leave behind the homeland and the nation, which have never been so adrift as they are today.

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