Cuba on Wednesday marked the third anniversary of its historic nationwide uprising on July 11, 2021. The country has faced unprecedented economic collapse, an increasingly violent communist crackdown, and the disappearance of hundreds of political prisoners who have been jailed since that day.
That day, tens of thousands of Cubans took to the streets in the country’s major cities (estimates that year put the total at about 187,000), demanding an end to more than 100 years of oppressive communist regime. Anti-communist demonstrations have taken place periodically in Cuba for decades, but the July 11 demonstration was different both in its scale and because it drew a large crowd that was not affiliated with any opposition groups or history of political activism.
Crowds chanted anti-Communist slogans, shouted “freedom,” marched in protest, and deliberately provoked the Communist Party by using symbols associated with “counter-revolutionary” activities, such as American flags and statues of the Virgin Mary. Christians were prominent among the protesters, but some Catholic clergy were also present. At least one priest, Father Castor José Álvarez Devesa, said: Had disappeared After several days of public violence by supporters of the government,
The government of dictator Raul Castro responded to the protests with extraordinary violence. Nominal “president” Miguel Díaz-Canel appeared on television and announced that “the order to fight has been given,” a reference to the Communist Party’s orders to ordinary Cubans to violently attack suspected dissidents in the streets. Videos leaked from Cuba in the days that followed showed government-organized buses packed with regime thugs armed with clubs and other rudimentary weapons traveling to the most protest-hit cities to beat, abduct, and silence dissidents.
Orders are always carried out. Spontaneously, revolutionary villages boarded public transport, were hit by tornadoes, grenades were thrown into the cars, the military raided them, they encountered other organized villages, and demanded food and medicine. pic.twitter.com/6Bv712yRZw
— Guajiro University (@GuajiroU) July 14, 2021
Cuba’s “Black Berets” were a particularly repressive form of state security used to attack people known to be anti-Communist, going door-to-door looking for people marching against the government. In one particularly horrifying incident captured on video, a “Black Beret” thug shot A man, later identified as Daniel Cardenas Diaz, was killed in front of his twin toddler children at his home.
The Castro regime has not been able to completely put down the protests in the three years since July 11. In 2022, Cubans are known to have held around 4,000 protests against the regime. In 2023, that number is expected to reach 10,000. On top of that According to Cuba’s Conflict Monitor, an NGO that tracks evidence of dissent and repression on the island, the death toll of the rebels is 5,700. Protests are expected to continue into 2024, and repression is continuing.
Many of those incarcerated since July 11, 2021, were convicted of Kafkaesque crimes such as “disrespect” and remain in prison to this day. Revealed On Thursday, the group said it had documented the presence of 1,728 political prisoners in Cuba over the past three years. Of those, only 150 were already political prisoners at the time of the 2021 protests. The group warned that this figure is significantly lower than the actual number of people persecuted in Cuba through the legal system for their political beliefs, and only includes those convicted of political crimes. Many prominent dissidents, including members of the Society of White Robes, a Catholic group made up of wives, daughters, sisters and other female relatives of political prisoners, are beaten and arrested by police when they try to attend mass every Sunday. The government releases them without charging them with a crime, then arrests them again a week later to avoid including them in the official political prisoner count.
Others persecuted by the Cuban police system include “more than 11,000 civilians, minors, and individuals who are not members of dissident organizations, convicted of ‘pre-criminal’ activities for sentences ranging from two to ten months,” Prisoners Defenders added. The regime charges these individuals with crimes such as “social danger,” which does not require them to take any action, but rather determines that they are at risk of engaging in “counter-revolutionary” activities.
Independent Cuban journalists and pro-democracy activists lamented on July 11 that Cuba’s economy, and the daily lives of most Cubans, are worse off than ever. Ariel Hidalgo and Elizaldo Sánchez Santa Cruz, founders of the Cuban Dissident and Human Rights Movement, said: I have written In a column for the independent media outlet 14 y Medio, he said the island potentially faces “an unprecedented social catastrophe” if the government does not find a way to quell ongoing anti-revolutionary sentiment in the country.
“There is now every reason to fear that the latest protests will not only not be peaceful, but will probably be destructive,” he wrote. “The public’s suffering and resentment are too great to believe that new reforms, which are as ineffective as those already in place, will solve the country’s serious problems. As the very word reform suggests, it means only a change in form, not the substance of the problem.”
“There is no longer a single revolutionary among the rank and file of the Communist Party or the state,” Hidalgo and Sánchez charged, saying the system was in danger of collapse unless 20th-century communism was completely reformed.
Ana Leon, a journalist for the independent website CubaNet, said another consequence of the July 11 protests was the large-scale crackdown that followed. escape 1.5 million Cubans fled to the outside world.
“The country hit rock bottom, but soon found itself at another level of seriousness that continues to haunt us to this day,” Leong wrote. More than a million people left the country, but those who stayed behind continued to protest long after the international attention had faded, she noted.
“Since then, all anti-government protests have been suppressed, with varying degrees of violence,” the column noted, listing key locations of protests since July 11, including Havana’s El Vedado district and the cities of Santiago de Cuba, Nuevitas and Juragua.
Castro’s regime has done little to address the poverty and repression that have sparked the protests. Last week, in response to growing food and fuel shortages, the regime declared the country was in a “war economy,” defined primarily as the persecution of those trying to do business outside Communist watch. The declaration seems to have offered little hope to Cubans in the face of relentless repression. Power outage; Serious Shortage food, medicineand other supplies; nearly infinite power Power outagean infrastructure crisis in Havana where deadly building collapses have become commonplace;
President Joe Biden’s administration, which failed to take any meaningful action in response to the 2021 protests, marked the anniversary through a message posted on Twitter by Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday.
Today, we reflect on the courage of the Cuban people who, on July 11, 2021, spoke with one voice to demand change, and we call for the immediate and unconditional release of all unjustly detained political prisoners.
— Secretary of State Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) July 11, 2024
“We call for the immediate and unconditional release of all unjustly detained political prisoners,” Blinken wrote.
