A “social outbreak” this July 11, second anniversary of the largest protests in the history of Cuba, it only exists, for the moment, in the official media. Without going any further, this Monday night and in prime time, on national television.
For nearly 11 minutes, the space presented by the spokesman of the regimedeputy and member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Humberto López, dedicated himself to denouncing alleged “forces that seek to carry out actions” to cause disturbances in the country financed from the United States.
López assured, presenting a single anonymous tweet as proof, that “the publications that call for a social outbreak in Cuba have increased in recent weeks.”
Then, as the announcer usually does, he mentioned Cubans residing in the United States with their names and surnames – he even gave his home address for one of them – and who, always according to his version, have dedicated themselves to sending messages to compatriots within the Island to convince them to carry out “actions” against the Government in exchange for telephone recharges.
To demonstrate these allegations, and as is also customary, he presented the alleged recipients of these messages on camera.
For López, the “strategic weapon against threats and aggressions will continue to be unity”, which “must be guarded with zeal”, he says, citing Raúl Castro
The official, who had no qualms about offering personal data or photographs of those denounced, ended his speech by asking himself: “If Cuba really hurts them, why not fight together, insiders and outsiders, for a country without a blockade, for a country where we all get involved in the search for solutions to our problems”.
For López, the “strategic weapon against threats and aggressions will continue to be unity”, which “must be guarded with zeal”, he says, quoting Raúl Castro, in the face of what he considers “lies, hoaxes and calls for hatred and the violence of the empire and its mercenaries”. And he concluded: “The majority decision of the Cuban people to overcome obstacles, to march forward and save the Revolution must continue to shine.”
Thanks to the note dedicated to the same subject in Granma This Monday, it is known that the words of Humberto López paraphrase the first line of a book entitled Cuba, a failed soft coup, by Manuel Hevia Frasquieri, presented in April of last year. For the historian of State Security, who died in January 2022, the peaceful protests of 9/11 were “violent street riots” that conformed “a typical subversive operation secretly directed by the CIA and the American intelligence community, promoted through programs subversives”.
In the official reports, there is no word for the almost 700 prisoners for taking to the streets, some of whom were sentenced to long prison terms for shouting “homeland and life”, “freedom”, “down with the dictatorship” or “Díaz-Canel singao”. According to the most recent report from the Madrid-based organization Prisoners Defendersin June there were 16 new political prisoners, with which the total list rises to 1,047.
For the rest, far from the portrait that is made of him in the official press, the anniversary of the demonstrations has so far been characterized by extreme vigilancethe selective cuts of the internet and the apathy of an impoverished population.
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