By Dianet Doimeadios Guerrero on June 14, 2026 from Havana
Pete Hegseth at the Guantanamo Naval Base on, June 10. foto: Reuters.
The Pentagon said that the purpose of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s visit to Guantanamo Naval Base was to “interact with the troops.”
Some images are worth more than a speech. And others, no matter how carefully staged, end up producing exactly the opposite effect of what was intended.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s recent visit to Guantanamo Naval Base was designed to project a message of strength. The former officer who served there two decades ago returned as head of the Pentagon. Wearing a Marine T-shirt, athletic shorts, a cap, and training shoes, he presented the image of a veteran among his troops—far from protocol and close to the front lines.
The staging was obvious.
However, those who know the Cuban people understand that there is a risk when attempting to communicate through symbols: once released into the public sphere, they cease to belong to the one who created them. They pass into the hands of the people.
And the people interpret them.
Or reinvent them.
Or laugh at them.
For decades, the Guantanamo Naval Base has been presented by Washington as a symbol of military presence, strategic control, and power. However, in the Cuban popular imagination, displays of force often meet a different fate. All it takes is an image, a gesture, or a phrase for popular humor to appropriate them and reduce them to a joke.
It is a form of cultural resistance that is uniquely ours: when one cannot compete with material power, one competes with irony. Cubans do not clash with a symbol; they tend to ridicule it. This is especially true when it comes to Trump, Hegseth, and company—a cabinet that has become pure gold—that golden hue so beloved by the Republican president—for meme creators around the world.
This is no coincidence. Jorge Mañach devoted memorable pages to studying “choteo” as one of the most distinctive expressions of Cuban culture. In *Indagación del choteo*, (loosely translated into “Investigation into the prank”) he described this tendency to undermine the solemnity of figures, speeches, and ceremonies through mockery and wit.
That’s why, while some analysts saw Hegseth’s attire as a demonstration of leadership and closeness to the troops, others noticed something much simpler.
The man showed up in shorts.
And then the inevitable question arose: Where are his pants?
In popular parlance, “having pants” has never been just a matter of clothing. The expression speaks to character, courage, and resolve. Hence, the image of the highest-ranking civilian official in the U.S. Armed Forces—the Secretary of War (or “Secretary of War Crimes,” as some call him)—walking through Guantánamo without long pants offers an irony that is hard to ignore for a people who have spent decades turning politics into raw material for humor.
What’s interesting is that the joke doesn’t question Hegseth’s actual authority or the military power of the United States: it highlights the gap that sometimes exists between the intended message and how it’s received.
The photograph was meant to convey strength. The mockery of it found an opportunity to downplay it.
Perhaps therein lies one of the oldest lessons in political communication: no symbol is completely under the control of the one who uses it. The audience always has the last word.
And in Cuba, that last word is very often accompanied by laughter, irony, or even mockery. It is the Cuban people’s weapon against arrogant imperial power; it is produced one hundred percent in Cuba, and they’ve never figured it out—neither before nor in 2026.
Because sometimes a display of power ends up becoming the talk of the town.
And because, for better or worse, humor remains one of the most effective ways this people has to look power squarely in the face and remind it that, even when it arrives dressed as Marines, it can still be left without pants—just as, for so long now, it has been left without arguments, without truth, and without respect. Thugs in suits—sometimes in shorts—who have nothing but bombs to fill the void of all that they lack.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English