A year after the largest anti-government demonstrations in Cuba in several decades, hundreds of people remain detained, waiting for trials or in prison for chanting pro-freedom slogans.
But the July 11 protests — and the ferocious crackdown that followed — have shed light on the Cuban people’s struggle for liberty, called international attention to the human rights crisis on the island and mobilized Cubans around the world in support of pro-democracy efforts.
The “nationwide protests marked a before and after in Cuban history, demonstrating to the international community that Cubans across the island want freedom, an end to the dictatorship, and were willing to risk life and limb to obtain it,” said John Suarez, the executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba, a human rights organization based in Washington.
“At the same time, Havana showed it was willing to use violence, including deadly force, to silence all these citizens who called for change,” he added.
To this day, the killing of Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, 36, a Black man shot by the police and the only official casualty reported by the government, remains unsolved, and the offending officer has not been penalized.
In a detailed new report, Justicia 11J and Cubalex, two advocacy groups that have verified arrests and trials of the protesters, said they confirmed the identities of four other people who were shot and injured by the police during the protest, including a 16-year-old.
The Cuban government has not said how many people the police arrested in connection with the uprising. Still, the two independent groups have documented at least 1,484 detentions, including those of 57 teenagers under age 18. About 700 people remain in jail, and another 622 had already been tried in proceedings lacking due process, according to testimony from relatives and several indictments and other legal documents the groups obtained.
But state violence did not end with the arrests. According to the report, prisoners have faced retaliation and beatings while in prison and have been denied medical treatment, while their families have faced harassment and intimidation.
“We have recorded forms of retaliation such as sudden transfers, temporary forced disappearances, isolation, incommunicado detentions, beatings and physical violence and other systematic forms of torture carried out against the prison population in general,” said attorney Laritza Diversent, the head of Cubalex, at an event last week hosted by the human rights group Freedom House to present the report.
Data collected by Justicia 11J and Cubalex have helped international organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Freedom House to conduct their own research and amplify the denunciation of the government crackdown.
“These patterns of repression that we have seen since July 11 last year are part of a systematic and generalized policy of repression that has massively violated the human rights of the Cuban people for decades and that in recent years has deepened precisely because of the complicit silence of the international community,” Erika Guevara, director for Latin America at Amnesty International, said at the Freedom House event.
A blow to the opposition
The severe punishment of protesters and recent laws and regulations passed by the Cuban government to quash dissent have created a human rights crisis that helped set in motion one of the largest exoduses of Cubans since Fidel Castro took power in 1959, a Human Rights Watch report concluded.
More than 140,000 Cubans have been detained at U.S. land borders since October last year and another 3,067 at sea, a mass exodus in proportions unseen in several decades.
Among those forced into exile are many of the dissidents, artists, entrepreneurs, academics and journalists that had contributed in recent years to organizing a civil society movement advocating for civil and political freedoms in the country.
The July 11 protests cannot be looked at in isolation, but in the context of previous events that contributed to this popular outburst, Suárez said.
“The San Isidro Movement’s escalating nonviolent protests in November 2020 led to the mass demonstration outside of the Ministry of Culture on November 27, 2020,” he said. “The song ‘Patria y Vida,’ which denounced the dictatorial nature of the Cuban regime and was sung by Cubans across the streets of the island during the July protests, also demonstrates the power and depth of this culture’s yearning for freedom.”
Another civil society initiative following the July demonstrations, a freedom march proposed by the group Archipiélago last November, garnered significant international attention but was frustrated by an extensive operation by Cuban security forces. Still, the debates surrounding the proposed march helped many Cubans to realize that “demonstrating is a right,” said one of its organizers, activist Saily González.
The march proposal was met with fierce repression. Diversent said 103 people were arrested, and 11 were still detained or were sent to prison after summary trials.
Cuban authorities also used the July 11 protests to imprison many prominent dissident figures, like the leaders of the San Isidro Movement, visual artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and the Grammy-award winner rapper Maykel ‘Osorbo’ Castillo, as well as the leader of the Cuban Patriotic Union, the longtime dissident José Daniel Ferrer.
The United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances sent a letter last week to the Cuban government urging it to inform Ferrer’s family of his whereabouts. His last communication, a phone call from a prison in Santiago de Cuba, was on June 4 and his relatives have not heard from him since that day.
Activists close to Otero Alcántara said he is again on a hunger strike and that he and Castillo have refused to appeal their sentences to five and nine years in prison, respectively.
The arrests, the forced exiles, and the constant harassment by state security have weakened the internal opposition movement in Cuba. But the potential for further instability remains, as Cubans struggle to get food and electricity and meet the most basic needs.
“The situation in Cuba is unsustainable,” González said. “There are blackouts, food shortages, inflation, and that will not be fixed in the coming months or even in the next year, which opens the possibility of a new social uprising. But many people in Cuba now want to emigrate, to leave the country. We are in the midst of a mass exodus.”
González, a Cuban entrepreneur turned activist, was also forced into exile after months of government harassment that included a so-called “act of repudiation” in front of her house in Santa Clara.
She is now living in Miami but resists the idea of “this being a cycle of activism in Cuba that has ended.”
“I personally believe that this is the time to continue, to empower the people who are still inside but also to continue doing things from exile,” she said.
Increased scrutiny
Despite the blow to the dissident movement, the headlines about the protests, the trials and the long sentences handed down to the demonstrators have summoned international condemnation and renewed attention to the human rights situation on the island.
European governments reluctant in the past to criticize Havana have issued strong statements condemning the repression. Cubans living in the United States and other countries have engaged in discussions about how to support those on the island. And even at the United Nations, where decades of Cuban government diplomacy have precluded condemnation of the lack of freedoms on the island, some committees have issued rare criticism of the government’s treatment of the minors and other political prisoners.
President Joe Biden has sanctioned several Cuban security agencies, officials and judges involved in the crackdown while announcing some measures to increase legal migration from Cuba. But Cuban American Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the U.S. should do more to support “the Cuban people’s desire for freedom.”
“Since July 2021, the regime has carried out hundreds of sham trials, tightened internet restrictions, and unleashed a new draconian criminal code,” Menendez said. “The Cuban people have responded to the regime’s intimidating and oppressive tactics by abandoning the island in historic numbers — a trend that underscores the gravity of the crisis in Cuba. Though the Biden administration was right to impose four rounds of targeted sanctions on the regime’s bad actors, greater efforts are needed given the absolute lack of justice — and freedom — in Cuba”.
Menendez said the administration should take additional steps including helping the Cuban people to secure unrestricted access to the internet, “boosting international pressure on the regime to release political prisoners, and working to break military oligarchs’ stranglehold on the Cuban economy.”
In Miami, the Cuban American Bar Association filed a petition with the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights, an independent arm of the Organization of American States, on behalf of 42 dissidents, including Ferrer and Otero Alcátara. They are currently working on including another 11, organization representatives told the Miami Herald.
The bar association’s petition “in support of these brave men and women who took to the streets to claim their rights of free speech, free association, and self-determination is intended to reconfirm to the Cuban regime that its continued repression of its citizens will be exposed and denounced before the international community and that its brutal and criminal nature should not be tolerated by democratic nations,” the organization said.
While these types of initiatives mostly carry symbolic weight, since the Cuban government usually pushes back or ignores requests by international organizations, such advocacy prevents the Cuban government from “erasing” the voices of Cuban dissidents from public discourse, the bar group’ statement said.
But human rights activists believe the response by the international community has not risen to the moment and that stronger actions, not statements, are needed.
“I think that Latin America and the international community owe the Cubans a mea culpa,” said Juan Pappier, senior researcher for Latin America at the Human Rights Foundation. “The response of the international community so far has been a failure and has allowed these protesters to feel abandoned and has allowed a dictatorship to prosper and continue for decades.”
