The protests of July 11, 2021, were a glorious feat for all of us who reject the totalitarian Castro regime.
A bravery that to a certain extent neutralizes the criticism that some make about what they describe as the extreme passivity of the Cuban people in the face of an iron dictatorship, an unpleasant saying, but that reflects a real perception of what is happening on the Island.
Without pretending to justify what should be criticized, the cowardice and apathy of many, we must wield the epic courage of the men and women who have never stopped confronting Castro’s totalitarianism.
Many have been the martyrs in this bloody process and even more so, the political prisoners who have served twenty years behind bars in these more than six decades, including the large number of young people trained under Castroism who populate the prisons for refusing to submit to tyranny.
It is true that for so many years there have been few protests, but it is an irrefutable truth that the more closed the force regimes are, the more difficult it is to oppose them and a totalitarian regime like the Cuban one, which has been able to establish a strong social and police control it does not give up space, rather it has to be taken from them, which has a high human cost, as history has shown.
The average Cuban, it seems, has concluded that it is better to conspire to overthrow the regime than to participate in a media demonstration, because for the Castro authorities it is as criminal to take to the streets demanding freedom as it is to participate in a plot to overthrow the tyranny. Other dictatorships brutally beat protesters and imprison them for hours, on the island of the Castros, added to the beating are long years of sentences to be served in subhuman conditions.
Young people in prison for participating in little-known protests or in other high-profile protests are in the same conditions as artists who, through their creations, express dissent and freedom of opinion.
The first anniversary of the past protests on July 11, 2021, leads us to remember some of the popular demonstrations against Castroism. Many of them forgotten by the long years that have passed and whose protagonists have mostly left for eternity.
Lost in the mists of time is the protest organized by mothers, wives and daughters, in January or February 1959, to demand an end to the executions. A few months later, in October, Commander Huber Matos, head of the Camagüey military , denounces the penetration of the communists in the armed forces and in the structure of the Revolution.
In November 1959, organized by the Catholic Church, the National Catholic Congress was held, a religious event that aimed to reiterate the Marxist influence in the government.
In February 1960, student discontent over the communist penetration in the study centers materialized with a protest organized by students in the Central Park of Havana, on the occasion of the visit to Cuba of the Soviet premier Anastas Mikoyan, in October the students demonstrated again in Santa Clara, against the execution of five captured guerrillas, among them the president of the FEU of Las Villas, Porfirio Ramírez Ruiz, that same year the electricity sector carried out a massive march in the capital rejecting the regime’s measures against the workers.
In 1961, the provinces of Oriente and Camagüey were the scene of student protests against communism and in September of that same year, parishioners and Catholic organizations organized a procession for the day of Charity of Copper in the church of La Caridad, Havana, that had been prohibited by the authorities, however, the religious walk took place with exclamations of “Long live Christ the King”, “Cuba Yes, Russia No”. The authorities reacted with such violence that young Arnaldo Socorro was shot dead.
In June and July 1962, the cities of Cárdenas and Perico, Matanzas, were shaken by large protests, to the extent that in the former the regime brought out tanks to repress them, a legacy that climaxed with the great protests of July 11 last year, with its sad aftermath of numerous injuries and hundreds of prisoners, many minors.
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