Cubans on and off the island marked the anniversary on Monday of the nationwide anti-communist protests on July 11, 2021 with renewed calls for the fall of the regime and freedom for the political prisoners, many of them children, still behind bars since that day.
July 11 has become a rallying call and informal holiday for the Cuban pro-freedom movement, threatening to displace the communist holiday of July 26 – the anniversary of Fidel Castro staging a deadly attack on the Moncada military barracks in 1953. In an apparent attempt to diminish the importance of the day, puppet dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged the anniversary on Sunday, claiming it as a day of defeat for “imperialism” in light of the continued existence of the Castro regime despite the protests.
The protests were the largest since at least the 2003 “Black Spring” of repression, which resulted in hundreds of arrests and led to the birth of one of the most influential dissident movements on the island, the Ladies in White. Unlike that protest wave, however, led by and largely featuring known anti-communist dissidents, the 2021 protests were different in that they featured tens of thousands of people, the vast majority of whom did not appear to have any background in politics resistance or human rights advocacy. Nearly every city in Cuba experienced a wave of peaceful marches – followed by brutal beatings, torture, and in-home shootings of suspected protesters – across the island. Dissident groups estimate that about 187,000 people joined the call to end the 63-year-old Communist Party rule in Cuba that day.
In the international diaspora, Cuban human rights groups have convened to honor the protests and continue the struggle. The Assembly of the Cuban Resistance, a coalition of anti-communist groups, called for Cubans around the world to decorate their homes and cars with the Cuban flag in honor of the protesters. Cuban-Americans will convene at the Bay of Pigs Museum in Miami, Florida, on Monday to begin a day of activities that include rosary prayers and remarks by freedom movement leaders seeking awareness and support for the Cuban cause.
On the island, naturally, the Castro regime has invested tremendous effort in ensuring that a repeat of last year’s July 11 does not occur. The main propaganda outlet of the Cuban Communist Party, the newspaper Granma, flooded its pages with articles comparing July 11 to John F. Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs massacre and demanding high participation in upcoming July 26 (Moncada barracks anniversary) events. Díaz-Canel, speaking at “an exchange with youth” on Sunday, attempted to claim July 11 as a communist holiday.
“Now they have tried to put a great spin on the events of July 11 and there are a great deal of contradictions in their way of focusing on the events,” Díaz-Canel said, referring to anti-communists generally. “They constructed the image of July 11 as an event of peaceful protests and are now trying to commemorate this day as a great development that destabilized Cuba from drastic positions.”
“It is true that unpleasant developments occurred last year,” Díaz-Canel was quoted as saying, “of the kind that we do not want to happen in this country; there were vandalistic acts with mercilessness, vulgarity, and tremendous aggression, but the people came out into the streets to defend the Revolution.”
Díaz-Canel was correct in that July 11 turned out to be a day of significant violence – as did the following weeks – but omitted that the communists were the ones who engaged in violence to silence the protesters. Díaz-Canel appeared on television on July 11, 2021, and urged communists to engage in aggressive acts against anyone suspected of supporting democracy, effectively calling for civil war.
“We are calling all the revolutionaries of our country, all the communists, to go to the streets anywhere that these provocations are happening today, from now on through all these days,” Díaz-Canel said, issuing what he referred to as “an order of combat.”
“We will not allow any mercenary counterrevolutionary bought off the by the government of the United States, a sellout to the Empire … to destabilize our country,” he asserted.
Following his call to arms, communists around the island began assaulting suspected protesters with makeshift weapons like sticks. Eyewitnesses recalled seeing buses of communist sympathizers rolling into major protest centers in the island’s largest cities, many of them appearing to be young men of military age.
The Communist Party sent roving teams of special forces on door-to-door raids looking for suspected protesters in the days after the initial protests. While much of the violence went undocumented, one particularly harrowing exchange recorded on a mobile phone showed communist police units gunning down a suspected protester, identified as Daniel Cárdenas Díaz, in his own living room in front of his wife and toddlers.
The non-governmental organizations Cubalex and Justice 11J have documented over 1,400 arrests since the protests occurred, many of them violent and involving children as young as 12 years old. As of Monday, these groups estimate that 701 people remain behind bars as a result of being accused of participating in the protests. More generally, Cuban Prisoners Defenders, an organization that tracks arrests on the island, has confirmed the existence of 999 political prisoners in Cuba who are specifically enduring prison sentences as a result of being accused of protesting on July 11, regardless of whether they actually did or not. Cuban Prisoners Defenders has confirmed the existence of 1,235 political prisoners in Cuba total.
These organizations emphasize in their prisoner tallies that the true number of political prisoners in Cuba is likely far higher, as the Castro regime regularly disappears known dissidents, charges them with petty crimes (which makes it difficult to track the true number), or engages in schemes such as regularly arresting, torturing, then releasing dissidents to keep them out of the statistics NGOs typically maintain.
The Castro regime arrested so many people on July 11 that it has since resorted to mass trials of as many as 30 people to process them all, finding most of them guilty of crimes like desacato (“disrespect”) or “sedition.” Human rights groups have denounced these mass trials, as child defendants are being tried with adults and individuals with known mental health conditions. Many of those children were sentenced to over a decade in prison. At least one child, 17-year-old Kendry Miranda Cárdenas, was sentenced to 19 years in prison on March on charges of “sedition” in a mass trial.
The repression has done little to silence Cubans. Protests have continued in the form of a consistent presence of dissidents on the streets in small numbers that the regime finds more difficult to contain than a mass outpouring of people on the streets. The families of those who disappeared into Cuban prisons on July 11 have led much of the effort to continue the rebellion.
Assembly of the Cuban ResistanceSpontaneous one-person protests have also become common in Cuba – one NGO documented over 200 protests in March 2022 alone.
In one such example in late April, a man later identified as Carlos Ernesto Díaz González, who uses the protest name “Ktivo Disidente,” climbed to the top of a park gate in Havana and began delivering a speech demanding respect for people who do not choose to support communism.
“You must allow us to participate in the political life of the country,” Díaz shouted. “Whoever is a communist should be so, but those who are not must be respected … If you want say ‘long live Fidel’ that is your problem, I don’t want to be a communist.”
Police rapidly whisked Díaz away to prison, where he remains and has attempted a hunger strike.
Cubans in the United States spent much of the year attempting to persuade President Joe Biden to champion their cause of freedom, but they have received a cool response.
Jack Knudsen / Breitbart NewsThen-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki initially appeared not to understand the protests at all, claiming that Cuban dissidents were demanding more stringent Chinese coronavirus measures when they chanted “freedom.” Biden himself largely avoided commenting on the events. In May, the Biden administration eased restrictions on sending money to the Castro regime, lending the communists support at a pivotal time of weakness.
The Biden administration has also increased efforts to keep Cubans seeking refuge in the United States via sea out of the country. The U.S. Coast Guard has deported 3,067 Cuban refugees by sea this fiscal year (beginning October 1, 2021) as of Sunday. Washington has emphasized the message “don’t take to the sea,” but has not exhibited similar zeal in urging migrants not to travel into the United States by land.
The Biden administration has done little to contain much larger migrant flows controlled by large-scale human traffickers on the U.S. southern border, which now also include large numbers of Cuban nationals.
Randy Clark
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