Cuba, two years of terror ignored by Europe and the United States but the rebellion is still alive
Despite the repression – including arrests and long prison sentences – following the historic protests of July 11, 2021 and the mass exodus, Cubans continue to take to the streets to demand freedom. Two years ago, for the first time in six decades, tens of thousands of Cubans in 51 cities protested against the regime, driven by the desperation that only brings misery and bondage with them. The NGO Prisoners Defenders (PD) estimates that 8,000 people have been arrested as a result of these protests, while the organization Archivo Cuba has documented 21 extrajudicial executions since July 11, 2021. Including the 36-year-old Diubis Tejedawho was shot in the back during the protest outside Guinera police station, and killed Cristian Barrera, 24, trying to flee the island hours after taking part in the demonstrations.
Cuba was at war, the militarization on the streets has proved it. The regime even prevented the citizens’ march for change on November 15, 2021 – led by the playwright Junior Garcianow exiled to Spain — and since then, half a million Cubans have fled the country, many from the regime’s “witch hunts” in the worst migration exodus to Cuba since 1959. Today, Prisoners Defenders documents the record number of 1,047 political prisoners who have suffered torture and punishment without any defense. On average, 35 minors are also sentenced to five years in prison, while the NGO has registered 246 new political prisoners in Cuba in the last 12 months alone.
For its part, the Cuban Observatory for Human Rights (OCDH) documented 7,445 repressive actions related to the exercise of civil and political rights between January and June 2023. However, according to the Observatory for Cuban Conflicts, there have been more than 2,500 protests so far in 2023. The regime’s strategyin addition to increasing repression, was to forge alliances with other totalitarian regimes like Russia, China and Iran, but despite this, both the United States and the European Union have implemented a political and commercial opening to the dictatorship in the hope that the alleged economic strengthening (which does not exist) will “miraculously” increase one … will lead Democratic transition.
The result so far is exactly the opposite in the past two years, with terror multiplying in America’s oldest dictatorship. “Political prisoners suffer the worst torture because they are all being tortured,” denounces the attached first comprehensive study on torture in Cuba. One of them is the leader of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), Jose Daniel Ferrer, half-naked in a cell with a 24-hour lamp on and an active frequency resonator that damages his nervous system. Ferrer, like Monsignor Rolando Álvarez in Nicaragua, refuses to be expelled.
The report also attests to other atrocities: Beatings, chemical poisoning, psychological torture, solitary confinement and medical malpractice. “When he is being tortured, Ferrer is treated with the greatest degree of hatred and inhumanity,” said Javier Larrondo, president of the NGO Prisoners Defenders. Felix Navarre, another opposition leader, turned 70 yesterday and was celebrating in prison. “His crime?” Daniel Lozano asks today in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo: “On July 12, 2021, go to the police station to inquire about the detainees. He was accompanied by his daughter, who was also detained. For the Cuban judges it was a crime against public order and Navarro was sentenced to nine years in prison, after the ten years he had already served for the “Black Spring”.
“It’s a cave of pain,” Navarro described in Aguica prison in Matanzas. “We collect water to drink just a few millimeters from the hole where we urinate and defecate. Prisoners are locked up in punishment cells for some reason, where they can stay for years. A tangible example is that of Armando Gomez de Armasimprisoned for more than 10 years,” he himself denounced in a touching audio released by the Cuban Observatory for Human Rights.
Artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara was photographed on July 11 climbing the Malecón to join protesters since his sixth hunger and thirst strike began last Saturday over his refusal to “leave the endless bars, the stone beds, “Accepting the white light that never exists” cuts out those 20 minutes on the phone a week.” Otero AlcantaraLeader of the Movimento San Isidro, received a five-year prison sentence for wanting to go to the Malecón for “public disorder, contempt of court and national symbols,” but it’s clear that this is expressed well in the European Union’s Josep Borrell and Biden’s US -Government don’t care much, actually not at all.
Paolo Manzo, July 11, 2023
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