MADRID, Spain.- Alberto Reyes Pías, parish priest in the diocese of Camagüey and one of the most critical voices within the Catholic Church in Cuba, considered that popular demonstrations such as those that occurred on the island on July 11, 2021 (11J) ” They are just around the corner.”
In interview with the EFE agency, pointed out that the Cuban regime is “stuck, closed in the discourse of the 60s”, but that “there are two things that act very against change in Cuba”: fear and hopelessness, due to the repression.
However, he is convinced that the protests will come soon because “people are fed up.”
The priest, who is in Madrid as part of a tour promoted by the NGO Cuban Human Rights Observatory, also stressed that changes on the island have to be made from within, but that external support is needed.
“We need the help of people from abroad who want the good of Cuba. There are many people who have swallowed the propaganda that Cuba is a happy island, that we are fine and that we continue to be the beacon of Latin America”, and for this reason they offer to “illuminate” the situation of the country abroad, even though there “people who do not want to hear,” quoted EFE.
This same month Reyes Pías, who on several occasions has publicly denounced the precarious situation in which the Caribbean nation finds itself, in an interview with the Spanish media The debate, He affirmed that the Cuban Government “has more than demonstrated its inability to build a society that is not only prosperous, but one capable of responding to the most basic aspirations of the human being.”
The parish priest considered: “Now there is no turning back, because now we have seen the true face of those who for years spoke to us day by day and tirelessly about how much they loved us and wanted our well-being. Now we know that it was all a lie, and that neither hand nor voice wavers when it comes to proclaiming destruction and death, and inciting the war of brother against brother in a fight whose wounds may never heal.
