Dark shirt, mask and authoritative gesture. This is how Miguel Díaz-Canel appeared before the television cameras on July 11, 2021, when the largest popular protests in the history of Cuba shook the streets of the Island. It was at that moment that he said the phrase that has defined the strategy political and repressive in these two years: “The order of combat has been given. And he added the no less disturbing threat: “We are ready for anything.”
From that moment until now, the Cuban ruling party has followed the repressive script to the letter. More than 700 of the protesters arrested in those demonstrations remain behind bars, political discourse has radicalized, and thousands of critical citizens have been driven into exile or silence. Terror has spread in national life and the regime has not given an inch in its control over society.
However, on the second anniversary of 9/11 there are many more reasons for public outrage. Inflation, massive impoverishment, the devaluation of the Cuban peso and the deterioration of public services, which have collapsed from medical care to the water supply, mean that the motivations for the protest continue, even if they have multiplied. .
The regime has also made many enemies. Each family of a political prisoner is lost ground for indoctrination. Nobody knows more about the failure of the Cuban model than those mothers who every month must do the impossible to put together the bag with food to take their children to prison. Who can continue to believe in the system after being visited and threatened by a State Security agent?
At what point will anger be stronger than fear and misery will push beyond the limits of repression. It’s hard to tell
At what point will anger be stronger than fear and misery will push beyond the limits imposed by repression. It is very difficult to know. One day before that 9/11 no one could have predicted that hours later the Cubans, indoctrinated for decades and civically handcuffed, would ignore their fears and star in images for history: overturned police cars, raised fists, lips pronouncing the forbidden word: “freedom”.
Two years later, neither amnesty has been granted to those arrested in those protests nor has the regime implemented significant measures to open the way for criticism and dissent in public spaces. Contrary to the opening, it has closed ranks and tightened the ideological screw. Extremism has spread, the last masks to show a democratic spirit have fallen and there is not a drop of modesty left to pretend that one governs with popular support.
nor the pardon to the more than a thousand political prisoners has arrived, nor have steps in the direction of democratic change begun. Instead, Havana has turned to the Russia of Vladimir Putin in search of economic support, supporting the invasion of Ukraine and posing for family photos with the most unpresentable and authoritarian regimes on the planet.
Those demonstrations did not bring freedom to Cuba but they changed it forever. Few doubt that there is a dictatorship on the island. The fracture between the regime and society deepened considerably and the Cubans learned some lessons that they will apply in the future. How long will it take to put into practice the teachings of that Sunday day two years ago? No one dares to set a date for the next protest. Nobody could have put a date on that 11J.
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