Cuba marked a somber third anniversary since the historic nationwide uprisings of July 11, 2021, on Wednesday, facing unprecedented economic disaster, increasingly violent communist repression, and the absence of hundreds of political prisoners still behind bars since that day.
Tens of thousands of Cubans in every major city in the country – an estimate from that year puts the total number at around 187,000 people – took the streets of the country on that day demanding an end to the over-century-old repressive communist regime. While anti-communist protests in Cuba have been a regular occurrence for decades, the July 11 movement differed from the standard protests both in its scope and the large number of people not affiliated with any dissident group or with a history of political activity that it attracted.
In addition to chanting anti-communist slogans, shouting “liberty,” and marching in protest, the crowds deliberately angered the Communist Party by using symbols associated with “counterrevolutionary” activity, such as the American flag and a statute of the Virgin Mary. Christians were prominently featured in the protests, including several members of the Catholic clergy. At least one priest, Father Castor José Álvarez Devesa, disappeared for days after receiving a public beating from regime sympathizers:
The regime of dictator Raúl Castro responded to the protests with outsized violence. Figurehead “president” Miguel Díaz-Canel appeared on television announcing that the “order of combat has been issued,” referring to a Communist Party command to regular Cuban citizens to violently assault anyone suspected of being a dissident in the streets. Videos leaking out of Cuba in the ensuing days showed government-organized buses full of regime thugs carrying clubs and other rudimentary weapons, shipping into the cities with the most protest activity to beat, abduct, and otherwise silence dissidents:
Cuba’s “black berets,” a particularly repressive wing of state security used to attack known anti-communists, engaged in door-to-door raids looking for people who marched against the government. In one particularly harrowing incident caught on video, “black beret” thugs shot a man later identified as Daniel Cárdenas Díaz in his home, in front of his twin toddlers.
The Castro regime has not been able to fully subdue the protest movement in the three years since July 11. Cubans held nearly 4,000 known protests against the regime in 2022. In 2023, that number was above 5,700, according to the Cuban Observatory of Conflict, an NGO that tracks evidence of dissident activity and repression on the island. Protests have continued into 2024, as has the repression.
Many of those imprisoned in the days after July 11, 2021, remain behind bars to this day, convicted of Kafkaesque crimes such as “disrespect.” Prisoners Defenders, a human rights monitor dedicated to advocacy for political prisoners on the island, revealed on Thursday that it has documented the existence of 1,728 political prisoners in the country in the last three years, only 150 of whom were already political prisoners on the date of the 2021 protests. That number, the group warns, is significantly lower than the true number of people in Cuba persecuted through the legal system for their political beliefs and only includes those convicted of political crimes. Many well-known dissidents – including the members of the Ladies in White, a Catholic group consisting of the wives, daughters, sisters, and other female relatives of political prisoners – face weekly police beatings and arrests as they attempt to attend Mass on Sundays. The government releases them, never charging them with crimes, and again arrests them a week later, keeping them from being part of the official political prisoner tally.
Others persecuted by the Cuban police system include “over 11,000 civilians, juveniles … non-members of opposition organizations with sentences ranging between two years and ten months, convicted of ‘precriminal’ activity,” Prisoners Defenders added. The regime accuses these individuals of crimes such as “social dangerousness” that do not require the person to take any action but, rather, are found to be at risk of engaging in “counterrevolutionary” activity.
Independent journalists and pro-democracy activists on the island marked July 11 with laments that the state of the Cuban economy – and, thus, the daily lives of most Cubans – is arguably worse than ever. Ariel Hidalgo and Elizardo Sánchez Santacruz, founders of the Dissident and Human Rights Movement of Cuba, wrote in a column for the independent outlet 14 y Medio that the island faces a potentially “unprecedented social catastrophe” if the regime does not find a way to quell the ongoing disgust with the Revolution in the country.
“Now we have enough reasons to fear that this time the protests will not only not be peaceful but, probably, catastrophic,” the wrote. “The suffering and resentment of the population is just too much to believe that new reforms as inefficient as the ones already implemented will resolve the country’s grave problems. Reform, as the word itself indicates, signifies only a change in form and not the essence of these problems.”
Hidalgo and Sánchez denounced that “there is no longer a single revolutionary in the rank and file of the Communist Party or the state,” and the system is on the brink of collapse without a complete overhaul of 20th century communism.
In the pages of the independent site Cubanet, journalist Ana León noted that another result of the July 11 protests, following the repression, was a massive exodus of 1.5 million Cubans to the outside world.
“The country hit bottom, but we soon discovered other levels of depth that keep dragging us to date,” León wrote. Over a million left, she noted, but those who stayed continued to protest long after the international attention faded.
“Since then, all the anti-government protests have been repressed with greater or lesser ferocity,” the column noted, listing sites of prominent post-July 11 protests such as Havana’s El Vedado neighborhood and the cities of Santiago de Cuba, Nuevitas, and Juraguá.
The Castro regime has done little to address the poverty and repression driving the protests. Last week, in response to growing food and fuel shortages, the regime announced that it declares itself to be in a “war-time economy,” which it defined mostly as the persecution of people attempting to do business outside of the watchful eye of the Communist Party. The declaration appeared to do little to inspire hope among Cubans, who are facing incessant blackouts; critical shortages of food, medicine, and other supplies; near-endless power blackouts; and an infrastructure crisis in which deadly building collapses have become routine in Havana.
The administration of President Joe Biden, which took no meaningful action in response to the 2021 protests, marked the anniversary on Wednesday through a message posted on Twitter by Secretary of State Antony Blinken:
“We call for the immediate and unconditional release of all unjustly detained political prisoners,” Blinken wrote.
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