I can’t find the post of the old Cuban man. I’ve looked in every folder, in every virtual nook and cranny. Nada.
But I think of him often. It was one of the first images I’d seen of the historic anti-regime Cuban uprising on July 2021. The gentleman was elegant, white hair, dark skin, maybe in his late 70s. He filmed himself as he walked to join the protest in his town. And he was weeping as he walked. “It’s finally happening,” he kept saying. The emotion caught in his throat. I felt it too.
Like so many other Cubans that day, the old cubano thought 63 years of single-party dictatorial rule was ending. That the regime was wrong about its socialist system being “irrevocable.”
For those of us who follow human rights in Cuba or have ties to the island—my working-class family fled in 1967 when I was five—the world seems to have forgotten what many thought would never happen in such a militarized repressive country. A countrywide, peaceful uprising, with thousands of Cubans shouting libertadand abajo la dictadura.
Granted, the world’s been busy with a pandemic, racial and political turmoil, inflation, an ever-hotter planet. But the regime’s decades-long propaganda campaign has created a support network that springs into action to defend the dictatorship when its abuses make headlines, as it did during and after the uprising. The regime’s supporters make speeches, hold rallies, pass resolutions blaming partial trade embargo for all of Cuba’s woes, exactly the story the dictatorship uses to smother its victims’ voices.
The speeches skip over the dictatorship’s human rights violations. No one mentions that the military conglomerate controls the most profitable portions of the economy, including tourism. That luxury hotels for foreign tourists don’t suffer power outages and food shortages like average Cubans. Nothing is said about the dictatorship’s vocal support of Russia’s “special operation” against Ukraine, or its ongoing military involvement in the anti-democratic governments of Venezuela and Nicaragua. No one asks if feeding a dictatorship with that track record is a good idea.
So, I’m doing my part, on this second anniversary of 11J, as the uprising is known in Cuba. I’m thinking about the old cubano and wondering what happened to him.
Is he in the U.S. now, like the 350,000 Cubans who gave up on their homeland, sold everything, climbed mountains and forged rivers, and crossed our southern border in 2022?
Did he end up in a hot cell crammed with protestors in the midst of that summer’s COVID surge? Was his family threatened, relatives expelled from work or school because of his post? Was he tried without access to a lawyer, along with other defendants, the only witnesses the agents who arrested him? Is he in a cell with common criminals who beat him to win the guards’ favor. Is he sick or starving because the rotten rice and foul water he gets do more harm than good?
NGOs have documented more than 1000 political prisoners related to 11J. 116 women and 35 boys and girls under eighteen remain in custody. The adults’ sentences average about ten years. Some prisoners are in work camps, others in jails described as “horrendous.” Many prisoners report being beaten, kept in cells so small they are wedged against the walls, with open latrines running across floors, trying to sleep on excrement-covered bedding under lights that are never turned off. No wonder some political prisoners have attempted to take their own lives and others have gone on life-threatening hunger and thirst strikes.
Anamely Ramos González understands the variety of Cuban suffering all too well. The 38-year-old former professor of art history was an important member of the San Isidro Movement, a Havana-based artist collective dedicated to nonviolent activism for basic human rights on the island. Her work with the group led to her expulsion from a university post she’d held for twelve years. Then, in February 2022, the regime forcibly exiled her. She’s been struggling to make her way in the U.S. since, couch surfing and doing odd jobs when she’s not pressuring the Cuban government to free political prisoners.
She shakes her head when I mention embargo-excuse tactics. “The embargo doesn’t exist,” she says. “There are empresarios living here doing great business on the island.” “Some of them have consultancies that teach other businesspeople how to evade it [the embargo]…The Americans have to listen to us. We have to change the conversation.”
Anamely’s immediate concern now is the health of one of her imprisoned friends and fellow San Isidro member, Luis Manuel Otero Alcantára. On July 8th, the award-winning artist began a hunger strike in the maximum-security prison where he is serving a five-year sentence for “insulting national symbols”. It’s his sixth effort to use his body as a means of protest. His friends fear for his life.
Anamely describes another source of dismay. The regime’s expertise at what it does best: stay in power. She is “horrified” that despite the dictatorship’s latest abuses it is successfully “selling the narrative that it is making reforms and opening up the country.” But it is not real, she says. “I think they’re stalling for time, figuring out how to perpetuate their power, like they always have…We are pawns in their game.”
I have no words of comfort to offer, none that either of us would believe. The odds of winning freedom look worse than ever to many Cubans. The uprising the world had been waiting for only brought more suffering for the Cubans who shook off their fear and marched that day. The dictatorship’s propaganda machine is as shiny as ever, the regime’s friends on alert, ready to defend what they see as a humanitarian revolution but average Cubans know is simply a brutal military dictatorship.
I’d like to think the courage and resistance Cubans showed that day—and continue to show—still matter. The protests go on, much smaller of course, but they go on, despite the severe crackdowns.
Maybe the freedom I heard catch in the old cubano’s voice as it escaped that day— that great exhalation after 63 years of political asphyxiation— changed him forever. Maybe the yearning for freedom is different now because it’s right there, so close, and Cubans remember it well.
Today and always, I wish for the old cubano, for all Cubans, the freedom they tasted that day.