There is a specific kind of humidity in Havana that smells less like the Caribbean and more like the stagnant breath of a revolution that forgot to die forty years ago. This week, the residents of the capital were once again marshaled into the streets—not for bread, which remains a luxury, but for the one thing the state provides in abundance: state-sanctioned grief. The occasion? The return of several Cubans who managed to get themselves killed during a botched U.S.-led raid in Venezuela. It is a classic tale of two idiots meeting in a dark alley, and as usual, the people in the alley are the ones who end up in the wooden boxes.

Let’s start with the Americans, those masterminds of the modern 'operation.' One has to admire the sheer, unadulterated hubris required to think that a handful of mercenaries and a PowerPoint presentation could topple a regime. The United States has spent the last century treating Latin America like a particularly frustrating game of Whac-A-Mole, yet they consistently fail to bring the right mallet. This latest 'raid' was less a tactical strike and more a theatrical production of 'GI Joe: The Geriatric Years.' It’s the same old American song: privatize the war, outsource the incompetence, and then act shocked when the 'contractors'—a word we use when 'unlucky idiots' sounds too honest—get liquidated by the very people they were supposed to liberate. The American empire is currently a geriatric patient swinging a rusty baseball bat in a china shop; they aren’t breaking the right things, they’re just making a mess that everyone else has to clean up.

On the other side of this tragedy-porn we have the Cuban government, a regime that has perfected the art of the funeral. Nothing secures a failing ideology quite like a fresh batch of martyrs. For the leadership in Havana, these dead men are more useful now than they ever were alive. As long as they were breathing, they were just more mouths to feed in an economy that produces nothing but cigars and bureaucracy. But in death? In death, they are a PR goldmine. They are the 'victims of imperialist aggression,' the 'sons of the revolution,' and whatever other tired adjectives the state-run media can scrape from the bottom of the barrel. Watch as the officials line up, their faces set in that rehearsed mask of solemnity that masks the internal calculation of how many more months of political capital these bodies will buy them. They don't care about the men; they care about the optics of the parade.

And then we have the public. Oh, the poor, exhausted public. There they are, lining the streets of Havana, standing in the sweltering heat to watch the motorcade pass. The BBC reports they are 'paying their respects,' which is a polite journalist’s way of saying they are fulfilling their quota of public presence. In a society where your loyalty is measured by your visibility at state events, a funeral is a mandatory performance. Do they mourn? Perhaps. But they are likely mourning the fact that their lives are spent as pawns in a geopolitical chess match between a dying empire and a fossilized revolution. They are trapped in a loop, a historical reenactment that never ends. One side sends the bullets, the other side provides the targets, and the people are expected to clap—or weep—on cue.

Venezuela, of course, remains the ultimate sandbox for this stupidity. It is the stage where the world’s most incompetent actors go to die. It’s a place where 'sovereignty' is a word tossed around by people who have sold their country’s soul to the highest bidder, whether that bidder speaks English, Russian, or Mandarin. The fact that Cubans are dying on Venezuelan soil in a U.S. raid is the peak of 21st-century absurdity. It is a multi-layered cake of failure. It’s a proxy war where the proxies don’t even know what they’re fighting for anymore, beyond the vague hope that maybe, just maybe, the next regime will be slightly less parasitic than the current one. Spoiler alert: it won’t be.

Ultimately, this entire spectacle is a reminder that humanity’s greatest talent is the ability to repeat the same mistakes with increasing levels of fanfare. We have the technology to reach the stars, yet we use it to coordinate better ways to kill each other in the jungle over ideologies that were debunked before the invention of the internet. The Americans will keep planning their 'raids' from the safety of Florida strip malls, the Cuban government will keep polishing its coffins, and the people will keep standing in the sun, waiting for a future that is never coming. It’s not a tragedy; it’s a sitcom that has been running for seventy seasons and has long since lost the plot. Put the cameras away, Havana. We’ve seen this episode before, and the ending is always the same: the wrong people are buried, and the right people stay in power.