Cubans on the island and in exile are marking the two-year anniversary on Tuesday of the historic, nationwide anti-communist protests of July 11, 2021, estimated to have drawn out nearly 200,000 people to demand an end to the violent Castro family oligarchy.
Peaceful protests erupted in nearly every municipality in Cuba that day, prompting figurehead “president” Miguel Díaz-Canel to issue an “order of combat” demanding civilian communists violently assault anyone suspected of disagreeing with the regime and to deploy door-to-door riot police to shoot suspected protesters in their own homes and drag them away to prison.
In one instance, Cuban “black beret” repressive forces were caught on video shooting a man, Daniel Joel Cárdenas Díaz, in front of his twin toddlers. He was later sentenced to 15 years in prison for “public disorder, propagating epidemics, sabotage, corruption of minors, and others.”
The protests garnered widespread international attention, particularly in the United States, where Cuban exiles and their allies took to the White House to demand leftist President Joe Biden support the protesters.
The Biden State Department responded to the protests by claiming that, rather than opposing communism, Cubans were protesting the lack of access to Wuhan coronavirus vaccines.
The Biden administration had no coherent Cuba policy at the time and has done little to update its policy at press time outside of occasional meetings with Castro regime henchmen.
Two years later, American media have largely moved on from the ongoing struggle for freedom in Cuba, but Cubans have not. Human rights organizations documented nearly 4,000 protests against communism in Cuba throughout 2022, most of which did not receive any corporate American media coverage. Researchers and advocates have confirmed the existence of over 1,000 political prisoners in Cuba, a plurality of which were arrested on July 11, 2021, or during the crackdown later that week – likely a severe undercount of the true number of prisoners of conscience on the island given the difficult of confirming such cases with the regime and collecting information on police repression in rural and remote areas.
The July 11 protests were deadly and rekindled the Castro regime’s longstanding tradition of extrajudicial killings. The non-governmental organization (NGO) Archivo Cuba revealed on Monday that it had confirmed 21 extrajudicial killings by the state in Cuba since the day of the protests, including multiple teens. The Castro regime has admitted to only one killing in the aftermath of the protests, that of 37-year-old Diubis Laurencio Tejeda.
The human rights organization Prisoners Defenders confirmed on Monday, as of the end of June, 1,047 cases of individuals imprisoned in Cuba due to their political ideas. About 660 of these were arrested as a result of their participation, or perceived participation, in the July 11 protests – a small number, mostly child political prisoners and those with documented mental illness, deny that they intentionally demonstrated against the regime. Javier Larrondo, the president of Prisoners Defenders, told Breitbart News in a message on Monday that 35 of those 1,047 confirmed political prisoners are children and 117 are women. A study published by the organization in May confirmed that every single individual identified as a prisoner of conscience in Cuba has endured state torture, “80 percent of whom experienced five methods of torture or more,” Larrondo noted.
A significant number of those imprisoned for peaceful protests have denounced the regime for denying them medical care, leaving them with severe health problems. Among those is Loreto Hernández García, one of the leaders of the Association of Free Yorubas of Cuba, an Afro-Cuban Santería organization opposed to the regime. In June, Amnesty International condemned the Cuban regime for imprisoning Hernández on charges of “disrespect” and “public disorder” for his peaceful protest and denying him medical care, despite a documented history of diabetes and hypertension. Hernández’s family has repeatedly documented instances of beatings and racist abuse against Hernández by Cuban regime agents in prison.
Many prisoners have faced abuse and torture in prison for continuing to protest. On Monday, the U.S.-based Cuban outlet Martí Noticias reported that guards brutally assaulted political prisoner Juan Enrique Pérez Sánchez, serving eight years in prison for protesting on July 11, after he entered the prison’s cafeteria wearing a sign reading “down with the dictatorship” on one side and “we were so hungry we ate our fear” on the other.
“The guards threw him on the ground and stomped on his head with their feet,” his wife, Dayana Aranda Batista, told Martí. “They took him away in handcuffs, I am alarmed … he is on hunger strike.”
Multiple women imprisoned for joining the protests have accused the regime of rape and sexual torture. Prisoners Defenders’ extensive Torture in Cuba report also documented cases of guards using attack dogs to maul prisoners and beating family members outside of prison – including, in one instance, a police beating of a prisoners’ 74-year-old grandmother that left her needing a leg amputation.
“It should not be tolerable for anyone to know that all of them and their families, including minors and women, are tortured without mercy, just as inaction before such barbarities is inadmissible,” Larrondo said in his message to Breitbart News.
The repression has not ceased with those in prison. As Prisoners Defenders noted this week, Cubans also experience routine “generalized repression, the penal impediment of being allowed to enter or exit the country without permission,” and imprisonment on “charges” of “proclivity to commit a crime in the future.” An estimated 11,000 people have been convicted of potentially committing a future crime, the organization noted.
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