He had already announced it on Monday, November 15, when an angry and violent mob prevented him from leaving his house, and she limited herself to giving applause at three in the afternoon and laying out her white sheets: if she couldn’t that day, Saily González would walk through the streets of Santa Clara with a white flower the next day, and if she couldn’t the next day , when out. That moment happened this Thursday.
With a yellow flower – “because in my patio there are no white flowers,” explained the young woman, a member of the Archipelago platform and owner of the Hostal Amarillo B&B-, a white blouse and a small cross on his chest, González walked through his city while recorded his action on video.
“I decided to bring my flower to Antonio Maceo for the freedom of Cuba, for the rights of all Cubans and for the liberation of political prisoners,” he told 14ymedio, precisely this November 18, “when one year since the barracks of San Isidro“, the protest of the homonymous Movement in Old Havana for the arrest and summary judgment of rebellious rapper Denis Solís, in which Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maykel Castillo Osorbo they declared in hunger and thirst strike.
“It is my way of honoring those people, who began, or restarted, this struggle to demand our rights, to demand freedom,” he says in his images.
“It is my way of honoring those people, who started, or restarted, this fight to demand our rights, to demand freedoms”
When she contacted this newspaper, she claimed to be returning home, without anyone having followed her.
“This individual, civic and totally peaceful demonstration is precisely my act of position before what is happening here in Cuba,” González says to the camera as he walks, while remembering the more than 600 prisoners by the 11J, in addition to Alcántara and Osorbo, “with a very delicate health condition” in prison, and the boy Reinel Rodríguez, taken to a “conduct school” for joining the 15N initiative.
The youngest, 15 years old, He was released precisely this Thursday, after the outrage on social networks and pressure from international organizations.
At one point on Saily González’s walk, a passerby greets her and she asks him: “Do you want to go out? I’m demonstrating.” The man says hello to the camera and replies, sympathetically, “Oh well, me too.” At another point, she is seen greeting someone who is passing by, saying: “The solidarity that all this has caused is incredible.”
She then recounts how that same day a lady stopped her to tell her that she could not do anything because she was going to lose her job, but that she was with them, “with all of us who are raising our voices, demanding freedom, demanding rights, demanding the release of political prisoners “
Recording herself with the phone, the young woman clarifies, is a “protection” measure and, thus, she asks her followers to stay connected until she ends the transmission.
“I’m not going to exhort anyone to do what I do, because for that you need conviction, you need to be clear about things,” he says. “I have them clear and I am not going to stop.” And it will not stop, he insists, “from within Cuba, from Santa Clara, where the siege of State Security may even be more dangerous.”
“I’m not going to exhort anyone to do what I do, because for that you need conviction, you need to be clear about things,” he says. “I have them clear and I am not going to stop”
González reiterates that the situation in Cuba “has become unsustainable”: “We do not have a way to cover our basic needs and the fault is not with the blockade. The fault lies with the Cuban Government, which while we were in the middle of a global pandemic, decided to allocate the resources that should be directed to the people to build hotels, which have gone through where you already know the needs of the Cuban people. “
Likewise, he argues that he does not show where he is going, during his walk, to avoid acts like those that happened on the 14th and 15th, with these “beasts that are called Cuban women and that do not represent us.” Last Monday and for several days, in front of her home in Santa Clara, flags of the Federation of Cuban Women were displayed among those who insulted the activist.
“I want to contribute to my country, I want to be able to contribute to the project of a better Cuba,” says González. “This is my country and I also have rights.” At that moment, he announces that he is reaching his destination, the statue of Antonio Maceo, where he places his flower and then withdraws without pause.
After the regime disrupted the Civic March for Change through threats, acts of repudiation and militarization of the cities, Archipelago called for the peaceful protests to continue, in multiple ways, such as applause, saucepans or white clothes, until November 27, when one year of the sitting of more than 300 people before the Ministry of Culture of Cuba and the subsequent meeting of about thirty of them with Vice Minister Fernando Rojas.
From the departure to SpainOn Tuesday, the most visible figure on the platform, Yunior García Aguilera, the group has not offered further indications. Saily González was one of the members who spoke out publicly after García Aguilera’s departure, in solidarity: “I don’t think anyone has the right to judge and repudiate what Yunior did; we are not the ones who judge and repudiate.”
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