Monologue of Death

(Written and published for the first time in January 2015 — one year and eleven months before the death of the man once called “the Commander.”)

It was a story born from a night of catharsis, in the first days of January 2015. A story in which I left pieces of my skin and my tears upon the page, recalling so much lived and so much documented through the testimonies of dozens of people. Their voices allowed me, after that purging, to write this symbolic narrative — a kind of trial, perhaps, that I held in my own peculiar way against him, the Commander. But to my sorrow, in November 2016, he departed from the material world, and I never saw my dream fulfilled.

Without further ado, indulge yourselves in this singular monologue.

Monologue of Death

It is 3:00 a.m. — the hour when the dead rise.

Upon a soft, luxurious bed lies the dozing body of an old man. Only his body sleeps, while his soul wanders alone through the spirals of another realm, seeking consolation — or perhaps a balm to soothe its despair. Voices from beyond begin to stir within the opulent yet cold room (cold despite its warmth). Each night, these voices of the afterlife return, faithful to their mission: to disturb, to torment the sleeper through his dreams. Cries of “Freedom! Justice! It was all a lie!” echo beyond the silent walls. A face marked by time, by emptiness, by the wrinkles of suffering, pales — a ghost of what was once vigor and command. The old man’s body shudders; his eyelids tremble, restless, seeking some hidden refuge within the dream from which to flee those mourning wails.

Familiar and unknown dead gather nightly in their grim liturgy. The old man’s thin fingers twitch and clench unconsciously. His legs, too, seek instinctively the comfort of silk sheets — legs that search the bed for the warmth of another body, but find none. His soul writhes, tormented, trapped each night within the dominion of darkness. And then she arrives — the omnipotent, sovereign presence. As it must be, it is she who speaks, declaims, and foretells what divine law has appointed her to do: to inhibit… and to receive the final breath.

My Discourse. I Am Death

I have no intention—nor desire—to be courteous or merciful as I reveal the reason for my presence before you tonight. I simply exercise the authority and the power that are mine by nature. You feel me, I know. I can sense the trembling breath of your soul. I only hope—and indeed, I believe—that if you awaken tomorrow, you will feel the need, the duty, to transform the deeds already done. I am not God, but I exist because of Him. I, Death, am devoid of sentiment. I do not dwell within the coexistence of being to love. I am merely a passage, a motor toward another realm. I am change.

I do not give corporeal life, yet I bestow the life of spirit. It is I who takes the final breath. It is I who shows the dying the unfolding of their life in that last instant of departure. I feel nothing in that moment—I only fulfill. I inhale the last sigh here, and in the same act, grant life in the other world. Therefore, do not think that my mission is to judge you. I am, and always will be, impartial. My duty is to show you—and let you choose—whether you wish to continue living, or whether you decide to leave with me. I do it through my screen, upon which the departing soul beholds its harvest. It is then that the choice is made. At times I appear abruptly, through accident or force. Other times I arrive stealthily, slowly, wrapped in agony. In such cases, the soul must suffer in this living purgatory, for the departure cannot be sweet nor serene. So, it is with your passing—yours must be slow and just at the appointed hour.

First, you must behold all the good and the evil you have sown upon the earth. So, watch only what I show you—and meditate. I do not judge you; I merely reveal. Make use of my nocturnal visit, and may your soul, upon waking, show you the path to follow. Do not squander the chance to mend, to make right. Cleanse the aura of that which you call your island. Free it from deception. Thus, I am what I am—Death. And as such, I stand before you.

I exist only with and within truth. Nothing shall escape my retrospective screen.

Your fervent rhetoric has always made you feel victorious and powerful before the masses.

You have never admitted to a mistake, never confessed to a single failure.

You achieved everything you ever desired in life — perhaps that is why the emptiness within you has grown so vast. I have watched you closely, and through your victorious power over adversity, you became enslaved by your own words.

You always focused on your path — the road of power and triumph.

Your unwavering faith in yourself (before the eyes of your self-proclaimed inner god) turned you into a ruler, relentless in your actions.

I acknowledge your grace, but you were never truly divine. Superstitious, as any good Cuban, your bond with santería granted you supernatural strength over the masses.

Talkative and eloquent beyond most men — daring, warlike, half-sorcerer, I’d say.

Many virtues, as many flaws. Your immense ego led you to believe yourself as essential as the rain, though in truth, you never were. There was a moment in your long political life when you made yourself feel omnipotent — what foolishness! Those endless speeches, that with time turned you into a verbose man, trapped in your own spiral of lies. Only in your beginnings — before your ravenous greed became your master — did you stir emotion and awaken hope. But that was only at the very start. Yes, you fought to become a legend, and indeed, sir, you succeeded. Yes, you possessed oratorical brilliance — you could find the right tone for each exchange, the right word for each moment. Another grave mistake: for now, time itself presents the bill.

A personality beyond complex. Some believe you were touched by the finger of God, for they say it is impossible that an entire people, even exhausted, could endure such suffering. At some point in your political career, a beautiful, free white dove made her appearance at one of your speeches — she even landed upon your shoulder. With that act, as if by magic, the bird seemed to recognize a harmony with your own being. To the masses, and to the most devout, it appeared a sign of divine favor — your supposed alliance with the Almighty. Yet even for this, time will make you pay. But tell me — was everything always white before the eyes of God? On countless occasions you managed to escape unscathed when I — Death — crossed your path, ready and incited to end your existence. A skilled practitioner of Yoruba witchcraft, you were bestowed with Africa’s eternal treasures — gifts only nature herself can give. In the 1980s, immaculate in your period of “whiteness,” you walked proudly when crowned in Africa. When your strong spiritual guide in santería departed this world, you chose to be initiated into the ancient and wise religion of La Regla Lucumí. You knew well that no help was ever enough. Your goal was clear: to be master and lord of an island cut off from the world. And today I tell you, old man, that even your own Yoruba saints shall demand their account at this — your almost final hour.

Your beginning was glorious, just as you wished. Your entrance was masterful, without question. Yet your vast merits have withered into nothingness beneath the daily emptiness you have birthed through your misrule. Your people die — and it is not by my hand.

I am everywhere, hovering like a vulture’s shadow, sensing apathy, disillusionment, and walking dead wandering a path with no destination. And still, Hope continues to roam those darkened streets, scattering her dim sparks — just in case a tomorrow might remain, though tomorrow resounds in doubt. Only the day-to-day exists. For the many, the only escape is to cross the ninety miles: “At least there, one can eat,” they say. Entire families destroyed, torn apart by loss — by exile, by solitude. You have sickened millions.

No matter what material wealth one may possess on your island, in truth, all is lost the instant one must begin again far from the soil that first gave them breath. I see everywhere people who left everything behind in search of what is theirs by divine right — freedom.

Yet many remain imprisoned by memory: a scent, a vanished homeland, abandoned loves, buried dead. Have you, even for the briefest instant, stopped to contemplate the magnitude of your wrongdoing? What did you teach, old man — what doctrines did you leave, now reduced to ashes? So many strings of lies and illusions. You were granted the cruel fortune of ruling a nation beyond the bounds of reason. Year after year fell upon a people who, scarcely realizing it, were stripped of the greatest gift bestowed upon humankind — freedom. Lost harvests, monopolized land, an entire island transformed from richness to ruin — from abundance to a starved, sleeping cayman. Cuba has always been a powerful and magical island — more than you could ever imagine. The wisdom of her deep waters shelters not only coral kingdoms but a sunken, imperial city that once held an inexplicable, divine degree of spiritual evolution. Cuba — and the blending of her people — has made her cradle of noble and resilient lineages. Her fertile soil, her bewitching sky. So many martyrs and patriots have spilled their precious blood for this beloved island — a land that cries for love and peace from all four corners. A land that has borne the pain of exterminated natives and enslaved Africans. Oh, how little you have understood what you were given, poor old man…

And today I find myself here delivering this speech for the simple, sole purpose of discovering how and when I will put an end to your existence. I will do it, but first I must act in the only way I know how: by replaying for you, as if in a film, the true events and incidents of the forty-nine years of your disastrous dictatorship, continuing up to the present day as a shadow that watches every step of your brother Raúl Castro, who now holds power and thus turns that mandate into a Castro dynasty. Here I show you your “goodness” and your wickedness. Your harvest. Your life as a politician and leader on this, your path.

The beginning

You came into the world around 1926 in a small town in the eastern province of the country. That day a great storm rocked the sky — Shango, I am sure, was present at your birth. An almost apocalyptic instant materialized; surely there was even a near-alignment of the planets in our galaxy and all trembled at such an event. As on other occasions, the arrival of an important figure to humanity is accompanied by universal tremors. Your coming as a man to earth later shook the future of a country. You are the fifth of nine siblings. From a respectable, decent family of modest means, not one of great wealth. You were fearless and disobedient from youth; perhaps for that reason in adolescence you were sent to boarding school at a Jesuit college in Santiago de Cuba. Your rural manners made you the object of ridicule among your classmates, who mocked you for your countryside origins. You earned a degree in Law in the capital, Havana. Your protests became more frequent and you provoked students, inciting them to disturbances and political unrest. Yes, you were a rabble-rouser and fighter from the time you were barely a young man. Your whole being and spirit demanded struggle. Your thirst for battle grew alongside a right-wing political regime that then ruled the country and which, according to you and a great many others, would subordinate the island to its whim and convenience. Yet history today shows who in reality subjugated an entire nation.

Around 1953 a group of young, brave revolutionaries led by you and your brother Raúl Castro launched the assault on the Moncada barracks with the aim of provoking a revolution and inciting the people to rise against the Batista dictatorship — an outcome that ultimately did not occur. Your group of men and two women suffered a great defeat; more than half died. Raúl and you managed to escape, but you were eventually captured and your brother, close to you, surrendered to the authorities. With your imprisonment they attempted to stifle any possible bid for power. You assumed your own defense and, thanks to that inner force you naturally possess, you defended yourself and cried out in that unforgettable defense speech the phrase (which you later appropriated): “Condemn me, it does not matter; history will absolve me.” Nevertheless, the sentence stood and you were taken to an isolated island to serve a 19-month term — a sentence that did not run its full course because Batista later decreed a political amnesty, seeking fame and popularity, and, perhaps due to some feminine influence, you were freed after only a few months.

Marches of the island toward the United States followed, and after some time living in New York you left for Mexico where, among many others, you met a Spanish republican military man with whom you prepared for a new revolutionary attempt. The idea endured. The guerrilla was a band of hot-blooded men, beings willing to do anything to see a “free Cuba.” Those 82 men, nearly all from Latin America, would dramatically change the future of an island that then, according to part of history, had been turned into an American brothel. But something kept failing. Despite the studied tactics, you could not deliver the decisive blow that would catapult you to a stormy imperial peak — a triumph that, over the years, would prove famished for a people. After the next failed attack you understood that the plan to topple Batista was sound but the way you were putting your ideas into practice was not. It was then that you began to rally the humblest masses, the peasants, with talks that convinced and indoctrinated them. You spoke directly to them, immersed yourself in Mother Nature, entrusted yourself to the land, and persuaded the rural folk to join the guerrilla.

Around 1956, together with your guerrilla, you settled in the Sierra Maestra. The following years, up until 1959, were filled with continuous attacks and strategies aimed at seizing power. It was during those years that Guevara made his appearance and joined your cause—an alliance that in the years to come would make you inseparable, and at the same time, the cause of an end (for Che) that the world still does not fully know.

You entered Havana victorious in 1959. That’s when the killings of those opposed to the revolution began. Anyone who disagreed with your politics was either given a ticket to leave their homeland or sent to the slaughter by your battalions. Thousands of people were forced to abandon the island, leaving behind homes, families, friends, and possessions. Demonstrations echoed across the country with cries of “Freedom! Fidel! Fidel! The people are with you! Down with Yankee imperialism!” You managed to win over the poorest and most ignorant classes of the people; with them, populism was far easier. You stirred the pot from the very start, old man!

Once you had secured triumph, you began to impose new laws and reforms throughout Cuba. You created an army just for yourself—an immense force of armed men, trained and indoctrinated solely to annihilate anyone who dared oppose you, men and women drilled to defend your name and your figure, and of course, to protect all that now served your personal interests. You launched the literacy campaign, the public health campaign—yes, good things for the people—but while you built, you also destroyed. You nationalized the most important companies, the largest industries, more than seventy percent of all the country’s land, the entire banking system, the great factories, the sugar mills, the mining industry, the oil fields and refineries, all trade entering and leaving the island, every television and radio station, every newspaper, the bus lines, the airlines, the railroads—you seized everything.

While on one hand you created literacy, on the other you nationalized and took ownership of schools and hospitals alike. The list of what you appropriated from the island’s economic wealth is endless. You converted an entire nation into a socialist system, though your communist alignment was evident from the very beginning. Thus began your era. An era that, to your regret, from the moment of your rise as Commander, was never entirely luminous—though many claim otherwise.

Long before you imposed your law and took full control of the island, Cuba was the queen of Caribbean tourism. Then, already seated in power, with your hostile policies you erased every trace of capitalist tourism and the nightlife of the wealthy. You closed casinos and nightclubs and placed everything in the hands of “the people,” suffocating every memory of the Batista era. Another grave mistake, for tourism had been part of the country’s stability and economy—nothing to do with your fierce hatred toward the vices of Fulgencio Batista’s rule.

But in the years to come, you too succumbed to the seductive, pragmatic idea of reviving the country through tourism. Despite your fearful fanaticism and your obsession with protecting the people from “dishonor,” you eventually understood that reopening the doors to tourism would become your own passport to survival.

Proud and pleased, you toasted with your army over the victory at the Bay of Pigs when, organized by the CIA, Kennedy sent an offensive against the island—a shameful American defeat that tightened your bonds with the Soviet Union. In 1962, the world trembled during the Cuban Missile Crisis, teetering on the brink of nuclear war. It was then that the “U.S. blockade” began—a commercial, financial, and economic embargo that never truly existed as history tells it. Outdated now, like your rule, it still endures—a response to the expropriations carried out by you and your republican government, which confiscated the property of citizens cast out like human debris from their own land.

That embargo was also retaliation for the seizure of American-owned factories and companies—something I will remind you of again when my tale reaches the present day. The world stood on the edge of catastrophe as the two superpowers clashed. Had the Soviet Union launched its missiles, the United States would have retaliated, and a world war would have erupted. At last, after lengthy secret negotiations, an agreement was reached: Russia dismantled and removed its missiles from the island, and America lifted its hand from the button.

That was when the so-called “red telephone” was invented between the Soviet Union and the United States—so that any misunderstanding could be quickly resolved. After the missile crisis, peace was always uncertain. Your alliance with the Russians grew stronger, and for years, the exchange of favors continued—expansionist interests that sent Cuban soldiers, doctors, and teachers to Angola, Ethiopia, and Mozambique.

Among many things I could remind you of, I cannot omit the arrival of the most infamous and immortal invention: the ration book. For a people who, before your arrival, had known economic abundance and enjoyed American technology, the appearance of that little booklet marked a drastic change in the material and cultural life of every Cuban.

In 1963 you visited, for the first time, the country that would be your sister and ally for many years: the Soviet Union. There you were decorated as a hero of the USSR. That same year Kennedy was assassinated—this strange death (today no longer so strange)—which would mark the beginning of a different era and bring forth men and women who would fight against what is called the “New World Order.” That same year the Russians provoked an espionage scandal in England. Once again, the whole world was in motion and the name of one man was proclaimed in every corner of the earth: yes, old man, your name. In those years and through much of the seventies, Cuba welcomed a handful of foreigners under the pretense of showing the world the achievements gained by your socialist system. But soon, thanks to the decline of the sugar industry and the failing economy, you would make a drastic turn toward international tourism.

In 1965 Ernesto Che Guevara left and departed for Africa. Two years later his body was found in a jungle hospital in Bolivia. How I took him with me to the realm of souls—the world does not know. Discrepancies abound. Many say he was captured and tortured by the Bolivian army in collaboration with the CIA; others testify that he was secretly murdered by men who once shared his ideals. In short: an idol of the revolution for many, and a murderer for many others.

In 1968 you nationalized even the small businesses—the tiny stalls and humble trades that sustained the workers of society: the women selling snacks, the little peanut carts, the barber shops and modest hair salons, the street food carts selling roast pork sandwiches, the tiny fishmongers, family eateries, hardware stalls, sewing workshops—the endless list of small businesses that fed the humblest class. Nothing could be outside the State; everything had to be nationalized. From that point on you liquidated virtually all private economic activity—only the State remained possible—traumatically disrupting the levers of manufacturing, employment, and consumption.

You monopolized everything—indeed, I would say you even monopolized the souls of the Cuban people. It is astonishing to see how, slowly but surely, you transformed an island that at your rise had one of the highest per-capita incomes in Latin America. Cuba, once a major sugar producer and exporter, today finds almost all its mills at a standstill. You fed people false dreams while expropriating and devouring the true strength and identity of the Cuban. For you there was no balance—only possession and a venomous hatred that to this day you still bear toward the United States. That hatred has brought you to ruin, old man, though I sometimes wonder whether that hatred has not been part of a larger plan.

Little by little you won the trust of the students; it was enough for them to hear your speeches and anecdotes that lulled them into senseless hopes and illusions—the same speeches and stories that in the years to come converted fresh young minds into followers. Yet many began to perceive that behind so much socialism and communism a great deception was looming, though they had little power to shout again the resounding cry that decades earlier had been heard: “Freedom.” What I can say, however, is that despite your harsh and destructive work, the essence of the Cuban remains very much alive in many. Wherever the vast majority of exiles go across the world, they reclaim who they are and where they come from—their music and folklore, their poetry and romanticism, their patriotic love for their mestizo land. That great creativity and intelligence endure despite the evil you have engendered; though, yes, it is true that many remain asleep, accompanied by immense pain and a trauma inflicted by exile that is hard to cure.

The Seventies — The Birth of Blindness

You surrounded yourself with loyal followers in your party — none of them dared to disagree with you, a clear reflection of your authoritarian nature. You never could bear contradiction. Idolization became the highest proof of fidelity to you. You stormed into every household and claimed the most innocent ones for yourself. The “Oath to the Sun” sealed the living burial of an entire people. The world ceased to exist for the Cuban. There was no chance to know anything beyond the shores. Any intruder who dared to discover what lay beyond those crystal island waters paid for their audacity with prison — or with me. There is no time, no place, no moment that restrains my presence. I am everywhere, old man.

In 1970 you sent every able-bodied human to the sugar harvest. It was madness. People from all professions were forced to work the cane fields, and still the goal was never reached. Then you insisted that practically the entire population must go to university — everyone must study! You filled the country with doctors, lawyers, engineers, dentists… You decided that the land no longer mattered, abandoning agriculture completely. The harvest vanished — another one of your delusions. A country that once fed itself was plunged into poverty. Life’s contradictions. You closed the sugar mills, and now, even today, you wouldn’t know how to restart them. Your false independence led you to reject all possible help. You refused to buy parts for old industries, for cars, for factories. Everything remained as relics of that majestic Cuba — now just a spirit swaying in memory.

In 1975 the longest conflict in Africa began — one of the most extended of the Cold War. You sent Cubans to Angola; your commitment to that country was undeniable. But it is a debt you have never repaid — not the economic one for the weapons, but the debt owed to the families. A vast cemetery impossible to bring home to the island. I was there. Men suffering, begging for the end of a war that took too long to arrive. Tremendous trauma haunts those who were lucky enough to return alive — wounds that will never heal, not even in the youngest members of their homes. For the thousands of Cubans sent to fight a war that was not theirs, only hatred, sorrow, and fatal images burned into their eyes remain. For Cuban families, the end of the year meant not only the close of another 365 days or the hurricane season, but also the return of troops — more than a celebration, it was a miracle of life. Many gave their service with courage, yes, but the internal scars are deep. Because one does not only die physically; one perishes also in spirit. And as I always say — wars never coexist with the balance between life and natural death.

The hidden hatred toward you and your party grew like wild weeds. You were darkness for your people and a lantern for the world. Lies fattened and blindness spread across the island. Nothing was as you once proclaimed. I hover around you; I smell you closely. Assassination attempts came and went, but your end was not yet written. You wrapped yourself in your carrion dogs, and the ignorance — or shared interests — of parts of the world protected you. In 1976 a group of terrorists planted a bomb on an airplane, killing over seventy passengers. You branded the attack as anti-imperialist. Your days were being counted by millions of living souls, yet you did not know that a black cloud of hatred was rising above you — hatred that you yourself had cultivated through murder and oppression.

Political rallies were mandatory (and still are today). Anyone who failed to attend and pay tribute to you was branded a “worm” or a counterrevolutionary. For hours you would stand in the Plaza de la Revolución, speaking endlessly, hypnotizing the masses who in later years would wish you had lost your voice — for you lied so much, promised so much, that even your own party grew weary of your mediocrity turned into litany. The elections, which you called “democratic,” were nothing but another means to impose your will, depriving the people of the freedom to choose. “Every citizen must go to the polls to vote freely,” you said. Yet whom could they possibly vote for, when there was only you? Still, the naïve masses went like sheep to vote for their coma-andante. Inside the polling places — schools and improvised halls — Communist Party officials and soldiers waited. The voters could not even dare to whisper, let alone write, what they truly longed to say: “Down with the Castro dictatorship.” No, the poisoned stares of your pirate army pierced the victims of Castroism, who had no choice but to reelect, again and again, the one and only man: Fidel Castro Ruz.

Communism was now a fact on the island. “Pioneers for Communism — we will be like Che!” So recite the children from their earliest days at school. They are taught that Fidel is the father, the leader, the horse, the everything in Cuba — the one worth dying for. Indoctrination crushes the minds of children, instilling from infancy the same malicious hatred toward imperialism that you carry. Thus, the chain continues — stagnant, lifeless. Time itself seems to slow down.

From the seventies onward you sent schoolchildren — young adolescents — to work in the countryside. “Working early ennobles man,” you said. Mothers went every Sunday to bring their children food and warmth, praying to God that they would not lose their innocence. But Cuba hardens — contradiction upon contradiction. While the child studies and plays sports, he is also forced into adulthood, pushed to hate, to work the fields. You know well, old man, that much of Cuba’s agriculture has been worked by premature adolescents just beginning to grow into manhood and womanhood. Education is free, yes — but not entirely. Through forty-five days of forced labor, those children practically paid for their studies.

 In the homes, one could not disagree or speak against the regime — it was, and still is, taboo. Not even in euphemisms could dissent be expressed. The innocent children could not witness their parents’ discontent, nor their quiet disappointment toward the Party they once believed in. No — that would confuse them, for such feelings did not match what was proclaimed in the streets and taught in the schools. It was that simple. Confusion and blindness were sown in both homes and classrooms.

Meanwhile, you began the constant and massive marches throughout every corner of the island. Attendance was mandatory; every citizen had to show their obedience in patriotic acts. Speech after speech, while the economy evaporated second by second. Men and women of every profession were forced into the sugar fields, cutting cane in the name of collective effort. Everyone had to “do their part” to recover what was lost each day — the very sustenance of the nation. The echo of your words thundered everywhere: “He who is not with me is a counterrevolutionary. Socialism or death!” My God… And fear kept growing. Despair deepened. To the world, your name had already become a condemned Marxist hymn meaning “freedom, victory, progress, the defeat of capitalism.” A horror also fueled, of course, by those who, from afar and often unwittingly, fed your ego and inflated your myth.

The 1980s — The Mariel Exodus

The chaotic situation of the country forced thousands of people to dream of leaving the island for the United States of America. The economy collapsed, and you yourself declared the crisis the nation was enduring. During that time, a group of dissidents stormed the Peruvian embassy seeking political asylum. They were soon joined by thousands with one single wish — to escape the island.

Boats and planes were hijacked as desperate means of flight. Any route was valid — all that mattered was to escape the horrific reality of a starving people. For the Americans, it was a small victory before the world, proof of Cuba’s discontent. Enraged that no punishment befell those who hijacked the vessels, and following an incident at the Peruvian embassy that left a policeman dead in crossfire, you proclaimed to the winds that the Peruvian mission was open to anyone seeking asylum.

Oh, what chaos you unleashed! A human avalanche stormed the embassy grounds, a swarm of hungry, desperate souls. Hunger, despair, dysentery — even stench itself rivaled me, Death, as I moved among them. I claimed an old woman dehydrated beyond recovery, yet at the same time, life gave birth to a new child — in that no-man’s-land between worlds.

Everyone who longed to leave the country was branded as scum, criminal, parasite, worm, antisocial. A violent, murderous rebellion against them began. You opened the prison gates, releasing those you deemed dangerous or undesirable, giving them free passage out of Cuba — your alibi before the world. To your followers, nearly the entire blind nation, you crowned them as righteous patriots standing against the “traitors.” But not only “worms” and “scum” were expelled. No — you also ordered that many mentally ill people, lost within their own minds, be cast away from the island. Those who had no true sense of self, no grasp of reality — you told them to go elsewhere. To where, old man? And why? What future could such souls have when their minds wandered through worlds without horizon? You watched comfortably from your beautiful armchair, reveling in another macabre triumph. Over 125,000 people became protagonists of that exodus that changed forever the history and the fate of both those who left and those who stayed behind. Yet you screamed to the world that they were nothing but the worst of society. Yes — a small fraction of those thousands were criminals or unstable minds, and some remained so in their new land (though not all). But today, in honor of truth, and because I was there — taking those whose time had come — I must tell you, and you know it well: even in that human avalanche you called antisocial, there were moments of profound honor, humanity, and courage, even among the so-called scum you and your followers despised. To this day, the cruelty of your words still echoes. The story of Mariel has grown in magnitude with time, and it bears no resemblance to what happened later at the Port of Marioca, where more than five thousand people decided to choose another destiny, leaving behind the land that saw them born. Allow me to remind you of events in which I, as always, was present.

A beautiful and seemingly calm night. In the air, I smell fear, insecurity, and exile. My gaze sweeps through gloomy streets, and like a leech, I seep into the shadows to find those whose time has come to depart with me. I find a desolate scene: two entire families locked inside a home with padlocks and iron bars — yet the patio door remains open. They hide from the malicious mob that destroys everything in its path and tortures anyone who dares to wish for freedom. “They are worms! Scum! And should be treated as such!” you screamed on television. The two families cry out to their gods, united in a single dream — to escape the same island they love, now turned into a cursed land ruled by you, possessed not only by politics but by envy, ignorance, malice of flesh and soul alike. Then, in the dark silence of that night, a horde of seventy men and women storms the home of the refugees, shouting insults at the deserters of the regime: “Filthy worms! Damn scum! You think you’ll leave so easily?”

A hellish scene begins. Sticks and iron rods strike the bodies of the victims. They resist, but there is no way to fight back — the mob is too many. Among the vile crowd, a few men — as so often happens in the worst corners of humanity — seize a fourteen-year-old girl and, before the frozen and horrified eyes of her powerless parents, violate her mercilessly like a stray animal. The air vanishes from her throat; an infernal alliance between pain and suffocation convulses her body and signals to the beasts her life’s end. I, too, must take her — and soon after, her mother as well, for no heart could bear such agony. The surviving family, upon witnessing this horror in the darkness of one of the rooms, wails like wolves to a sinister sky. The mob covers the house with filth — with rotten eggs and tomatoes — leaving behind walls that forever bear the stench of hatred. The father, now a widower, holding his three-month-old son in trembling arms, weeps silently for the loss of his queen and his princess. He looks at the orphan and wonders if he has any reason left to go on living.

And so, I ask you, old man —

Do you truly believe you did the right thing?

For even if a single human soul longs to flee their homeland in sorrow — something, old man, has gone terribly wrong.

I pace ceaselessly through the streets and the most hidden places, everything calling to me. This time I plunge into a tumult in the streets. Hundreds of your defenders shout your name and cry out what they consider revolutionary. “Long live Fidel, the people are with you, away with the worms,” they chant. All is rightly said and done to praise you and to damn the poor people who want to leave. Each time reports reached your ears of people tortured, physically and psychologically abused, you said, “it is the people fighting the scum.” You, like Pontius Pilate, have washed your hands through all these years; what you did indirectly you blamed on the people, or you feigned ignorance of the facts. But I remind you of that very proverb you taught: “the one who kills the cow is no less guilty than the one who grabs its legs.” So plain and clear. Demonstrations came and went from every corner. You put buses in the big cities and trains at the disposal of country towns so every Cuban could be sent to demonstrate against the “worm” rabble. You screamed and sent signals like smoke, words that incited the people to hate and to commit injustices. All were obliged to leave their homes; anyone who refused to join the marches was labeled counterrevolutionary and was abused. In the homes of those who dared not take part in that barbarity, rotten eggs and filth were thrown — sometimes even right onto their bodies. The children, innocent yet cruel in their way, became a fragile but powerful engine in those events. Party militants went directly to schools to recruit the youngest, handing out dozens of boxes with rotten tomatoes and eggs that were to be hurled at the anti-patriotic crowd—everything accompanied by cries of repudiation. These children, with their unleashed fury, seemed like demon-torn little beasts; through this cruel act they prematurely learned what it meant to “love” their country. A cruel atrocity. Innocent yet fierce, the children sowed from an early age the harvest for an uncertain future. Every “worm” household was visited; they were forced to listen to the terrifying shouts of insults. In most cases they were beaten with iron rods and sticks; women were dragged by the hair; children were harassed by their schoolmates — of course, well instructed by their patriotic parents! These children, too, had to defend their flag and their Commander. In the capital there were cases of torture and the mutilation of fingers, faces slashed with razors. In the small towns, as often happens, the barbarity grew more macabre. From these situations, as in war, the vilest and darkest side of man is usually revealed. People took advantage to violate, to steal, to appropriate what is most precious in a human being… the soul.

I want you to observe well this image I revive for you, old man. It is of a young homosexual boy who inwardly did not want to leave the island; he was forced by his personal condition — he is but one example among many. His cry for life shook me, for even I feel pain when I arrive in an unnatural way! It saddens me to witness the little balance between life and death that persists in this world.

Thin and fragile like a willow, yet inwardly strong like the Siguaraya tree. The boy, forced, marched away from his country — he had no place left there. He had lost his job; he was the target in his neighborhood, branded the worst kind of scum. His father, a member of your Party, had begged him many times to go far away where his name would not even be a chimera. He did not want to go; he loved his land and his mother, the only living being who respected him. One afternoon of demonstrations he decided to attend one, to show that although he disagreed with those acts, he loved his country and, if necessary, would sell his convictions to stay in his land. So he went as one among many. Poor soul! In the midst of the tumult someone spotted him and recognized him. Immediately the Communist spotter cried out, “that’s a worm, he’s a faggot and surely wants to plant a bomb.” For what reason? They set upon the boy relentlessly. His cries for help and self-defense could not be heard. The mob only beat another worm, and when the hunger of hatred was sated, they threw him, completely naked, into a ditch. At nightfall he managed to drag himself home as best he could. That mother, upon seeing him, fell at his feet and licked his wounds with a face washed in tears. His father, however, seized his pistol and shouted, “You’ve disappointed me — why didn’t you simply leave?” With a single shot he ended the poor boy’s life. I took him with me — by love for his homeland and by hatred from his father, an authentic follower of you!

You cannot begin to imagine the magnitude of the harm you have caused, old man. I cannot take you with me without making you witness, on this great screen, the echo of your own actions. You have provoked hatred, disputes, envy. You have killed — directly and indirectly. You have forged a Cuban people greedy and covetous, for through the scarcity of the most essential goods, they discovered beyond the tides a paradise of possibilities… yet also a land filled with everything that impoverishes the soul. You have created a nation of idlers and swindlers; the lack of motivation to work has driven them to seek an easier way of life. To study a career is no longer important — the true goal is to earn dollars or euros to flee and start again elsewhere. You have murdered dreams, illusions, creativity, desires, horizons. You have lynched an entire people, old man! For this, I cannot take you with me so easily. No — you must agonize, watching again and again everything you destroyed. People do not abandon the land of their birth for a mere worldly whim. When one leaves behind everything one is — something very grave has happened.

The entire nation was in turmoil — those who remained and those who left alike, all trapped in the distortion of daily life. “The Cuban riffraff must go!” you declared. You generalized all dissidents as human garbage — a barbarity that still echoes, both among those who stayed and those who fled. You know, old man, it is sorrowful to find yourself at the crossroads where you now stand, wishing for death as you behold your ruin. The emptiness I sense in your soul is unfathomable. Without doubt, this is but one small note among many in the long list of human rights violations committed on the island you have ruled and enslaved for half a century.

I cannot forget the Canímar River Massacre — yet another tragedy where the only crime of those aboard was the wish to leave a country where they no longer felt safe or alive. Men, women, children — I took them with me, victims of hatred, rage, and an absurd ideal that breeds nothing but poverty — poverty of the soul. Once again, the night turned crimson, thick with the scent of me. So many anguished souls trapped in another dimension, never to witness that rare and precious thing that has always been scarce on this enigmatic island — something called justice.

During the eighties, repression deepened, and by the end of that decade emerged the dark and infamous Special Period. Your people became a source of tension for the entire world. You sent countless students to study in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia — yet not all reached those destinations. You diverted many of them to faraway wars, to battles that lasted thirteen long years. You meddled in everything that did not concern your people.

A country of barely ten million souls had some 300,000 soldiers scattered in foreign conflicts. After the deaths of Lenin, Stalin, and so many other communist leaders, you seized the ideology itself and spread it across the most innocent corners of the Earth. Yes, the Soviets — pioneers of Communism — had done it in their own way, as had China. But long before 1959, you were already preaching that lie, and once in power, driven by a murderous illusion, you appointed yourself the chosen axis of that cruel seed. And of course, you succeeded — though half-dead, you are still here.

You bound the island to Russian servitude, for in those days the Soviet Union sustained your economy through vast injections of capital and goods — funds meant to pay for wars that never belonged to your people. The guerrillas you trained in Havana spilled rivers of blood in distant lands for a dream without promise, a nightmare without meaning. You were armed as long as you clung to the Russians, but nothing is eternal, old man — the red berets would not last forever.

In that same decade, another plague was born and spread through the island’s tourist veins: the prostitution of Jineteras and Jineteros. Thus began a vile era of corruption, pedophilia, and abuse of power. Youths left their homes in search of skin upon skin — a foreign lover who could grant them material comfort or the chance to escape. Why? You know why. They longed for the most sacred and simple gift of the human spirit: freedom. You insisted before Heaven that there was no prostitution in Cuba — that the plague had been abolished the moment Batista fell. Lies. Prostitution is sorrowful anywhere, but most tragic of all when it is born of hunger and despair, when it preys upon the youngest and most vulnerable.

Ordinary citizens were forbidden from approaching foreigners — any contact, no matter how small, was punishable by prison. Yet it was all a grotesque charade. Beneath the façade, dollars flowed in secret through a corrupt Cuba. Police accepted bribes to look the other way, allowing girls and boys to enter hotels with foreign tourists. But punishment had to exist, and before the blind eyes of the crowd, you imprisoned the guilty as spectacle.

Girls of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old sold their bodies in exchange for material goods — or a visa to flee their land. They swallowed their dignity and pain, entering a cold, lustful world far from any father’s warmth. They suffered, humiliated, and often raped by members of your government’s own “security.” Their only dream was to touch the sky aboard an airplane.

Why did it happen, old man? Because Cuba was never the “blessed pearl of the Caribbean” you proclaimed. Foreigners came for the mulatto girls, for the black girls, sometimes seeking virgins — children sold by pimps to monsters disguised as tourists. You knew it, and you shouted that in your land such filth did not exist. Yet even the corrupted crept into the schools, where teachers, for a handful of dirty pesos, handed over the adolescent body to the foreign predator.

At first, these horrors remained hidden behind the façade of your regime, but by the nineties, prostitution born of necessity had multiplied. Many of those girls, once marked as criminals, were imprisoned for years, robbed of freedom, filled with hatred, resentment, and despair. Some remained forever broken; others, like wild mares, fought to escape the darkness into which society — and your deceitful, corrupt government — had thrown them.

All of this is proof enough of your failed rule. Simply put, if even a single human being must sell their soul or their body to obtain what is rightfully theirs — then something catastrophic has happened, old man. The balance of society has been lost, and for that, the blame lies squarely with the regime that governs it.

The 1990s — Lies, Lost Hopes, Hunger, and More Killings

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed into ruin, and with it, your image as a secondary dictator rose — one of the last few tyrannies still standing in the world. The loss of all Russian aid triggered what had long been foreseen: the total collapse of Cuba’s economy. Among your desperate strategies, one was your sudden opening to tourism — another bitter irony in your ruthless political career.

Tourists from every corner of the planet came to gaze upon a Cuba castrista sinking deeper each day into paralysis. It seemed as though time itself had stopped — or perhaps gone backward. The jewels of the island still bore the name of relics from a colonial era of beauty, created by the hands of men who once inhabited the land discovered by Christopher Columbus. Majestic cathedrals, splendid museums, Romanesque and Gothic architecture, legendary buildings — wonders that once harmonized with a lush, colorful, vibrant island.

But when you rose to power, the country’s beauty began to fade, for from the beginning, a shadowed epoch took hold of the nation. Cuba, as it once was, slowly died. You devoted yourself more to helping others — those living far beyond your shores — while your own people cried for aid, for reform, for the very rights you stripped from them.

Millions were poured into hotel investments — palaces of luxury never visited by the true Cuban. The coveted feasts of foreign visitors contrasted grotesquely with the hunger of those who could not freely buy the milk their children needed to grow. Hotels and resorts shone with light and splendor, while your people lived in darkness, envying all that you flaunted before their eyes — everything the outsider enjoyed.

Marriages of convenience multiplied desperate pacts to escape a prison-island adrift in the Caribbean. Entire families were torn apart by exile and loss. They say Cuba is divided — between your followers and your opposers. But look closely, old man: I see the same human being in both — the same spirit, wounded and weary, deprived of the most sacred thing of all: freedom.

Those who leave gain their physical liberty, yet within their souls remain forever imprisoned — haunted by memory, by the scent of their island, by the nostalgia of childhood that stains their present like a permanent wound. And those who stay by your side live trapped within a world of hypocrisy and lies. The prison of the soul is the same on both sides.

Thus, hatred for you never fades. It grows, hand in hand with repression — a swirling tornado devouring the corners of your people’s hearts.

In 1992, you offered Cubans a false dawn — a flicker of hope. After four decades of religious prohibition, of silenced saints and forbidden faith, you gave them a chalice sweetened with deceit. You allowed them to praise God again, to honor the Virgin, to return to churches, to celebrate baptisms and Catholic weddings. You gifted the people a dream to cling to, like barnacles to the wreck of their daily misery.

It may have seemed, on the surface, a noble gesture — but nothing you ever did was without price. You knew that by reviving their faith, you would take them for a few more years. You knew that while they prayed to Heaven, you could continue playing the omnipotent god of flesh below.

The arrival of the Supreme Pontiff (of that time) to the island filled the Cuban people with spiritual — more than religious — illusions. Never before had so many thousands of native souls walked endless kilometers seeking a smile, a word, a blessing — the image of an old man who gave them the greatest of all gifts.

John Paul II knew that the Cuban people were starving for prayers that could revive the era of peace and love from which they had been deprived. The great elder understood the balm that would bloom like a flower tattooed upon the souls of the living and the spirits of the dead. It was a blessing to see him step onto Cuban soil.

You were pleased — I am sure that, deep within, you too succumbed to the charm of that man capable of piercing hearts with his words and his humble presence, even the hearts of those you had long enslaved with your doctrine.

Crowds marched for hours just to hear — even from afar — the man who in so few hours gave so much love to those you called “your people.” Tears, laughter, celestial songs, hope, prayers, dances — even the drums echoed for a single illusion: the true change they believed would come with John Paul II’s arrival. Yes, it was a great gift to your Cuba, but… you have never given anything without expecting something in return.

Then you opened the door to another mass exodus. You allowed thousands of citizens to throw themselves into the sea toward that North so longed for by many. You offered them false confidence, and once again chaos ensued — another terrible mistake. Dreams were shattered, lives were lost, and many were imprisoned at the Guantánamo Naval Base. Another absurdity — another failure.

During the 1990s, prostitution increased again, multiplying the hidden cases of pedophilia, exploitation, and vice, while Cuba presented itself to the world as immaculate — behind the curtain, however, it had become a new Sodom and Gomorrah of the twentieth century. Lies, hunger, corruption, moral decay — the loss of every human value.

And now, old man, we have reached one of the darkest nights of your rule — the cruel event wrought by your own followers, your assassins. I remind you again of the Cuban saying: “He who holds the cow’s legs is as guilty as the one who kills it.”

Behold and delight yourself in this memory: a dawn in July of 1994 — the sinking of the tugboat 13 de Marzo.

A tugboat leaves Havana heading toward the coast of Florida. Onboard are sixty-eight souls — women, men, children — from five months to fifty years old. All carry one single dream: to reach the other shore, where a new morning might await.

The dark night joins in alliance with me. A catastrophe is coming, and I — Death — will be its witness. Human beings, so different, yet sharing the same color and the same dream that night. The children, innocent before life’s miseries, are guided by their parents who promise that beyond those dark waters lies a beautiful future. The men, hardened by life, focus only on steering their families toward that peaceful tomorrow they have foretold.

And there they go, praying to the Virgin of Regla to guard their journey. The starry night expands into me from every direction. It is just past 3:00 a.m. — the hour when, as I always say, the dead rise. The echo of the waves collides with the thrum of the engine. All is calm — until suddenly two government Polargo-type tugboats appear, blocking their path.

Panic seizes the night. Shouts split the silence. The command is clear — leave no survivors. Sink the vessel of hope.

A brutal blow strikes the fugitives’ tugboat. High-pressure water cannons begin their torture. The screams of the living mix with the hiss of the hoses. On the Havana seawall, a crowd of lovers and young bohemians watch in horror. They cannot believe what they are seeing. The authorities, realizing they are being observed, force the attack further out to sea.

There, away from witnesses, another state tugboat lurks like a predator, waiting. It joins the others — three monsters circling — and with relentless jets of water they finish what they began.

The victim ship splits, sinking slowly. The surface boils into a black whirlpool. Cries of terror shake the heavens. Bodies fall like feathers. Mothers clutch their children to their chests with the divine force of love, fighting against the waves, against fate.

I, who do not feel compassion, tremble before the injustice. I see a mother’s body — her heart giving out from anguish — fall lifeless into the sea. But even in death, her body becomes a raft of salvation for others who cling to her like a prayer for life. Behold the heroic mothers — their animal strength, their sacred rage to protect their young. Yet fate is cruel: not every mother can save all her children. The heart breaks as she holds the living one, seeing in him the reflection of the one I have taken. Love transforms her grief into fire — she shelters the living, embalming the wound of the dead child with the desperate tenderness of the survivor.

The tugboat, split in two, sinks beneath the waves — thirty-six lives stolen unjustly. You told the nation it was an accident, that your government had nothing to do with it. But you know, old man, the voice that gave the order was yours. The command came from no one else: Fidel Castro Ruz. An assassin who took innocent lives — children, mothers, fathers, even a five-month-old baby nursing at his mother’s breast, gathering strength for life. You ordered them killed as punishment, to terrify those who dreamed of escape. Your name had to remain a weapon, unbreakable, untouchable. You are greed, you are pride, you are corruption. This crime, for me, is one of the cruelest of all you committed — because it remains unpunished before the justice of men. You must pay for it before you cross to the other world.

Now that you have witnessed with me each instant of this massive violation, I ask your soul — there, on that bed where you slumber — if it can still answer me.

What remains from that dark, horrid, sorrowful night?

Silence takes hold of you. Not even your spirit dares to reply.

No matter — I will tell you.

What remains are the cries drowned in a sea of weeping.

Mothers and fathers orphaned of their children; children orphaned of their parents — all lost in an ocean of lies and pain.

Widows, friends, relatives, beings who lost their voices amid so much pleading for mercy and justice — cries that have scarcely been heard.

What remains is eternal loneliness, emptiness, helplessness — the desolation of survivors and of the families of the victims.

Nightly astral sobs of sacrificed souls, laments of the little ones who stubbornly replay the tender scenes that took place before the fatal end — scenes of love, of mothers and children still bound by the eternal umbilical cord not yet wounded.

These small ones do not accept their new nature; they wail without rest, like anguished sirens in the night — their cries can still be heard by an intuitive wanderer at sea.

All this remains from that lugubrious night… but of justice, nothing.

How could I possibly let you depart this world with grace? No — to leave sweetly is a reward that begins to be earned the moment one is born into life.

And you, old man, do not possess that marvelous privilege.

You tremble. I feel your fear. Feel me.

Your skin bristles — you are cold. Look at me!

Behold all the dead surrounding you, all those whom your henchmen dragged into the grave in your name.

Old man, do you feel my chill so near? Do not tremble — not yet. I will not take you with me now.

No — suffer. Contemplate your work. I am only beginning to show you the theater of your inferno. Seek comfort in some living soul — you will find none.

Seek the dead who, according to you, love you — they cannot come near this private judgment. Only you and I remain — Death — the same who has taken so many under the rule of your power.

Yes, this cold you feel… it is me. Do not fear; keep watching your painted canvas of pain, of blood, of greed, of hunger, of everything.

Look at me and feel me, old man — you are not leaving with me yet. The night is still young.

Tomorrow, if it ever dawns… only God will decide.

A new century—The dawn of a New Era

The new century arrived with a faint glimmer of possible transition on the island. In the decade of the 2000s, you prepared to transfer power to your brother. In 2011, you finally ceded your throne, insisting that the socialist-communist system must continue to prevail.

From the year 2000 until this day — 2014 — your body began to wither, because even the mightiest health comes to an end. You have endured, Caballo, as you called yourself: “I am the horse.” You have survived surrounded by the hatred of millions who once believed in you; you have endured through power, for that you did have — and how you fed upon it.

Dark forces from beyond sustained you, to such a degree that even I, Death, could not approach your side. I have searched for some authentic and valuable trace of your passage through power — and yes, you did some good for your island. But the harm you leave behind, old man, is far greater — and that is your truest legacy.

No matter how many good deeds you may have done, I cannot dwell on them, not when your evil outweighs them so completely. Even I — Death — have my own reverence for the sacred principle of life.

And how could I not remember those poor souls in the psychiatric hospital of Mazorra?

Negligence and corruption condemned dozens of them — men and women lost in the labyrinths of madness — to die like inmates in a concentration camp, perishing simply for being “insane.”

Ah, old man… You knew everything that happened on that island, absolutely everything. Yet you had no time for the truly vulnerable.

I began this monologue acknowledging your beginnings — which, by now, have proven to be so small — and now I nearly conclude with a cry for justice. Because I will not take you easily. No, you must relive, again and again, the echo of your rule over that island you called your own.

In your Cuba, a luxurious health system gleams — but only for the powerful and for foreigners. An opulent illusion that mocks the real one — the poor, broken, third-world medicine of your people.

That other health system, the one of the common folks, is a horror — stripped of the most essential means to care for the sick. Hospitals crumble, clinics decay. You forced many to become doctors and nurses against their will — because you love numbers, not souls.

You boast of a nation filled with “medical professionals,” even when many lack the sacred vocation to heal. And those who serve without compassion violate the very sanctity of life.

Hospitals and clinics — buildings that should be sanctuaries — are instead ruins of neglect, poverty, and scarcity.

This misery joins with the island’s deeper ruin — the filth of the streets, the floods from hurricanes, the foul pools of stagnant water that breed mosquitos and disease.

Malaria, cholera, dengue — plagues once defeated now rise again from the mud.

All this — this pestilence, this rot — is the child of your rule.

Theoretically, such things should not exist in a nation once known for the best medicine in the world — a cradle of great doctors.

And yet, those same professionals you boast of sending abroad to aid the poor of other nations leave behind their own people — dying slowly in silence.

Yes, their work abroad is heroic and selfless… but what of your own people, old man?

They are simply dying — quietly, steadily, every day.

I wander through the streets and—look, old man, look at all I see!

A generation without hope, accustomed to not wanting to study—why should they, when doctors, lawyers, and engineers make their living in the black market, doing anything except what they were trained for?

People running hidden businesses, desperate to obtain euros or dollars, by any means, just to feed their families.

I keep walking, and I see the loss of values growing like a plague. Faces without purpose drift through ruined streets, surviving day to day, searching for something—anything—to eat.

Majestic buildings, now collapsing, melt into a landscape of devastation.

Ancient cars still rattle through the roads, kept alive by the tenacity of the Cuban people—yes, that is something good, something noble. Those cars are relics of an age when the island still shone, when life still had momentum.

Decades and decades you spent blaming an absurd blockade—now as absurd as your rule.

At the beginning, it was perhaps a fair response to your theft and expropriations.

But as the decades passed, the echo of that blockade faded before the truth of your own waste—your internal and external spending on weapons, on luxuries for tourists, all for the benefit of you and your circle.

The people—your poor citizens—were the only ones who paid for your extravagance.

You impoverished an island that was once a cradle of abundance. The true embargo, old man, was the one you imposed on your own people.

By now, in this retrospective of your life, you must finally see the dimension of your ruin.

No! There are voices from beyond the grave that cry out for justice—voices of the living who lost their own for fear of speaking.

There are women and young girls scarred by the loss of their innocence, who gave their virginity to unworthy men for one reason only—to escape the island, or perhaps simply to survive another day.

There are mothers who never buried their sons, because I took them—taken in foreign fields, or swallowed by nameless waters—men whom your armies cast into the sea on stormy nights.

There were heroes, too—men and women you sent to the firing squad, because you feared the threat of their truth.

Others drowned in deep waters chasing the mirage of freedom.

Prisoners rotting behind bars for defending the sacred ideal of liberty; prisoners tortured, deprived of every human right. Widows, mothers, daughters, sisters—wandering the streets, shouting “Freedom for our prisoners!” And they are trampled by the ignorant ones still bewitched by the blindness you created in them. Pain. Hunger. Injustice. So much blood spilled. Souls leaving their homeland in search of tomorrow, only to meet betrayal, cruelty, and disillusion. Abandonment, hunger, confusion, madness, grief, blood, trauma—this is the harvest of your reign. Long, endless decades that will echo forever through history.

Here and Now — Only You and I

Your skin turns yellow, pale as a candle.

You can hardly move your hands or your legs.

Your eyes tremble as they stare at the ceiling, where souls gather—smiling and weeping—whispering without words: “We are waiting for you.”

You are here, in the middle of the night.

Breathe softly, old man. Do not struggle. I am not finished yet.

I will return, again and again, to make you relive all that you did, and all that was done in your name. I must, for even though all things echo in eternity and all things have their reason, justice must be eternal and impartial.

The fact that you lie here—nearly a corpse—does not erase your guilt.

No. Just as you entered through the grand gate, so must you depart with a touch of humility and grace. Let your final words be these:

“I am sorry, my people. Forgive me. Thank you for all that you have given me.”

That is the least you can offer, from this cold and gloomy bed.

To a people almost as dead as you.

So, breathe. Calm your trembling soul.

You are not alone.

I am here.

And I will remain…

until I inhale your final breath.

I — Doña Muerte.

With deepest love: Yirka Gonzalez