“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” – Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1999)
Friday, July 11, 2025 will mark the four year anniversary of the nationwide 11J protests in Cuba. Four years will have passed and today there are over a thousand political prisoners in Cuba, and most of them were jailed during those nonviolent protests.
The Madrid based human rights organization, Prisoners Defenders, places the total number of identified political prisoners in Cuba today at 1,158.
This anniversary also marks the death of two identified non-violent protesters killed by government agents one day later on July 12, 2021.
Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, a 36-year-old singer, was shot in the back by the police joining the 11J protests in a Havana suburb on July 12, 2021. Video of the aftermath of the shooting of this young man made it out of the island. Be warned, this is not easy to watch.
Christian Barrera Díaz went missing in Cuba on July 12, 2021 while engaged in nonviolent protest. Police told the family he was in custody, then said he drowned, and was buried in a mass grave. His family is convinced police beat him to death.
There are others, but the regime has terrorized their families into silence.
On Friday, July 11th at 7:00pm a vigil will be held at the Cuban Embassy on the four year anniversary of the 11J protests in Cuba. It is co-organized by the Center for a Free Cuba, Students for Liberty, and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation..
Cuban writer and journalist Carlos Alberto Montaner passed away two years ago on June 30, 2023, but he lived long enough to see, and reflect on the 11J protests. On October 30, 2021 he wrote a column for his blog reproduced below.titled, “Cuba, the end of the party”. In it he wrote how the Cuban dictatorship had shut down institutional avenues to non-violently address change, but pointed that when a critical mass is achieved, change will finally arrive.
“Previously, the Constitution, the communist aims of Cuban society and the role of the Party had been “armored,” so that it was highly unlikely to modify the course of Cuban events. However, it is practically impossible to prevent such changes towards openness. When will they happen? Once there is a critical mass that demands them or, otherwise, when certain people with effective power have the political will to carry them out.
Both forces concur in Cuba. On July 11, it became clear that young people want to expand society’s participation margins, but, at the same time, there are thousands of cadres from the Communist Party itself who call themselves “reformists” and are eager to initiate a substantial change that allows them to abandon collectivist and authoritarian superstitions forever. It has been 62 years of continuous failures.”
Courageous dissidents in the island have documented what happened in those days in mid-July 2021, and an abbreviated version with English subtitled is available below. Please share this video with others, and hold vigils in remembrance and to campaign for the release of Cuba’s political prisoners, and in demand for justice for those murdered by the dictatorship.
Translating Cuba, May 1, 2023
Cuba: An Open Letter to President Miguel Diaz-Canel
14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Madrid, 29 April 2023 — I’ve aged in opposition to your regime. Before you were born, I was a premature anti-communist, totally intuitive, at 16 years of age. I was 15 years old when the revolution triumphed. Today, I am 80. You have no right to this continuity. And I was anti-Batista, also, naturally. The “anti-Batista” was as a result of my parents. Manola and Ernesto were also. Arriving in exile on the afternoon of 9 September 1961, the change I observed in my father surprised me: it was a pro-Batista shift I attributed, without any basis, to his new wife: Lourdes Anaya-Murillo, the daughter of prominent Batista supporters.
Manola, continued to be anti-Batista. I was happy my mother continued feeling democracy in the same way I had learned: absolute tolerance to alien thought. I tell you this story so that you won’t believe the disinformation the regime disseminates in its publications about its adversaries. I have nothing to do with the CIA, nor terrorism, nor Batista, and there is not a shred of truth to the buzz “that Montaner helped train Yoani Sánchez on matters related to the internet” during one of her visits to Europe. Unlike Yoani, director of the magnificent and much-needed digital outlet 14ymedio, I have no interest in understanding how the internet functions. My knowledge of these matters is very limited. Those are excuses State Security makes to discredit those who propose initiatives on the margins of communism, such as the one in this letter.
Mr. Díaz-Canel, Marxism, as the substance of the communist system, has always failed, just as any leader who attempted it
Mr. Díaz-Canel, Marxism, as the substance of the communist system, has always failed, just as any leader who attempted it. Why? It has been implemented among the Germans and you’ve seen the results. It was tried among the Koreans and you’ve seen the consequences: on the same peninsula there is one portion, the north, which doesn’t even have electricity at night. And in the south, in turn, is the developed Korea which exports vehicles, televisions, and computers, and the population enjoys a standard of living similar to that of the first world.
What has not been achieved is equal results. Not everyone is powerful and rich in the most prosperous countries on the planet. There are, of course, many poor people in the world’s richest societies. But, what type of poor people find themselves immersed in those pockets of wealth? In the U.S. the poverty level for a family of four is an income less than $27,750, in addition to access to schools, hospitals, food stamps and justice. The welfare state is even more impressive in Nordic countries of Europe. Denmark will pay my granddaughter, Claudia, for her second Master’s degree. When she finishes she will begin life debt free.
This is all paid for by income generated from the salaries of workers and employer benefits. Confiscating large and medium enterprises was a grave error committed between June and December 1960 in Cuba. Charging taxes would have been sufficient. And confiscating small enterprises was a stupidity that occurred in 1968, when tens of thousands of businesses were taken by the State, during the “Revolutionary offensive,” some of them comprising only one person, such as taxis and certain barber shops and hair salons; much to its chagrin, Cuban society became the most communist on the planet.
Confiscating large and medium enterprises was a grave error committed between June and December 1960 in Cuba
I haven’t come this far to tell you what you already know. It is evident Marx was mistaken. That communism was based on the appropriation of the productive apparatus was a disaster. That our island is a tremendous catastrophe, with its cities and roads destroyed, as if it had suffered a bombardment from an unforgiving power. What you deserve to hear is “how to transform setbacks into gains” as I believe you like to say.
Recently, Rosa María Payá came to visit me in Madrid. She came to bring me a book. She is the daughter of Oswaldo Payá, who State Security murdered in 2012, along with Harold Cepero. This is what David E. Hoffman, who won the Pulitzer prize for historical research, has exposed through his research (Give Me Liberty, Simon & Schuster).
Today, Rosa María leads Cuba Decide and doesn’t flinch in her resolve to continue her father’s mission, when he headed the Movimiento Cristiano de Liberación [Christian Liberation Movement] and launched the Varela Project on the island. His objective was to hold a plebiscite through which Cubans could freely decide their destiny at the polls. An objective his daughter continues to pursue to end, once and for all, the curse that is the continuity you sadly preside over.
My time has already passed. The time for Castroism has been exhausted. In reality, it was born to fail from the beginning. This moment is for youth like Rosa María Payá, within and outside the island, who desperately search for what she summarizes as “defense of liberty, democracy and human rights.” Learn from them. You still can.
Translated by Silvia Suárez
https://translatingcuba.com/cuba-an-open-letter-to-president-miguel-diaz-canel/
El Blog de Montaner, 30 October 2021
Cuba, the end of the party
By Carlos Alberto Montaner
The Cuban march on November 15 has been called by the Archipelago. This group is not a political party and does not intend to replace the communists in the country’s leadership. It takes its name from diversity. It’s not true that Cuba is only an island. It is a large island – larger than the Netherlands and Belgium combined – and with many habitable islets, and also the Isle of Pines and the abundant keys.
Nor are its members at the service of the “Americans” or, specifically, of the CIA. This is the classic infamy with which the regime tries to disqualify those who oppose its forced unanimity. What the many members and supporters of the Archipelago want is to express themselves and tell their truths under the Constitution’s protection.
The Constitution guarantees freedom of thought, but, simultaneously, it subjects what is said to the socialist goals designed by the institutional order of the text itself. It is deliberately ambiguous since its model is the 1936 Stalin’s Constitution and its derivatives. On one side, it establishes the fundamental rights. On the other, it suppresses them.
In the Cuban case, when Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, on behalf of the ‘Christian Liberation Movement,’ presented more than ten thousand signatures (he presented more than 14,000) that were required to vote in a referendum on a constitutional amendment that would authorize the multiparty system, the Cuban Parliament (the ‘National Assembly of People’s Power’) did not bother to answer him.
In 2012, he was murdered along with Harold Cepero. They were too bothersome. Human Rights Watch tells it: after a confusing incident, in which only the Cubans died, despite the fact that both had got off the car on their own feet, unaided. This was told to me by Ángel Carromero, a young Spanish man who was driving the car on the day of the crime.
Previously, the Constitution, the communist aims of Cuban society and the role of the Party had been “armored,” so that it was highly unlikely to modify the course of Cuban events. However, it is practically impossible to prevent such changes towards openness. When will they happen? Once there is a critical mass that demands them or, otherwise, when certain people with effective power have the political will to carry them out.
Both forces concur in Cuba. On July 11, it became clear that young people want to expand society’s participation margins, but, at the same time, there are thousands of cadres from the Communist Party itself who call themselves “reformists” and are eager to initiate a substantial change that allows them to abandon collectivist and authoritarian superstitions forever. It has been 62 years of continuous failures.
In this sense, the cases of Leo Brouwer, Pablo Milanés, and Silvio Rodríguez, despite being different, are very significant. They repeated the “we have come this far” of José Saramago, when three young black men were executed in Havana on April 11, 2003. Brouwer sharply distanced himself from the Cuban regime due to the repression exercised against civil society on July 11 of this year. Hundreds of peaceful people were beaten and imprisoned, which was intolerable to this great-nephew of Ernesto Lecuona, a great guitarist and a great composer.
Pablo Milanés has lived in Spain since 1992, so his clear break with the regime, expressed in previous circumstances and now reiterated, is not surprising. More significant was the position taken by Silvio Rodríguez. He talked for more than an hour with the young playwright Yunior García Aguilera, an animator from Archipelago, and with his wife, Dayana, a filmmaker, after García Aguilera’s arbitrary arrest. From that meeting came out a formal request from the singer-songwriter to the dictatorship to release the hundreds of detainees who had not used violence.
Silvio Rodríguez said on Facebook, “The meeting with Yunior and Dayana was good, I am not exaggerating if I say fraternal; there was dialogue, exchange, we listened to each other with attention and respect. The most painful thing for me was hearing that they, as a generation, no longer felt part of the Cuban process but something else. They explained their arguments, their frustrations to me. I tried to make them understand that at my age everything was also much slower than we expected it to be.”
Silvio Rodríguez has taught Miguel Díaz-Canel a lesson on how to deal with the opposition. But he has received another quite obvious lesson – he has heard that Yunior and Dayana “do not feel part of the Cuban process.” The story of the Sierra Maestra is so old that it’s not possible for young people to bond emotionally with those stories. Silvio was born in the 1940s. Yunior in the eighties. If Silvio were as rational as he appears he would tell Díaz-Canel to get ready for the end of the party. It’s just around the corner.