Nederlands: Maleconazo ’94, LHCU
Cubans have been calling for freedom for decades. On July 11, 2021, hundreds of thousands of people across the island took part in nationwide protests, and the World took notice.
It was not the first time.
Thirty one years ago, on August 5, 1994, thousands of Cubans marched through Havana’s streets chanting “Freedom!” and “Down with the Castros” for the first time since the early 1960s in what became known as the Maleconazo.
During the Summer of 1994 Cubans were angry. The so-called “Special Period” which meant scarcity and hunger was underway, and news that Cuban government agents had murdered 37 Cubans who had tried to flee the island on the “13 de Marzo” tugboat on July 13, 1994 was circulating among the populace.
State Security agents, political police, and paramilitaries shot protesters and/or beat them down with batons and clubs.
In Havana, military trucks containing special troops and 50 caliber machine guns patrolled the streets, and the Castro government demonstrated the will to shoot at unarmed nonviolent protesters.
Cubans were beaten down, shot, and jailed. Thirty one years later and the full scale of repression remains unknown.
What we do know, is thanks to a courageous few.
The Dutch eyewitness
Karel Poort, a Dutch freelance photographer and tourist visiting Cuba, took photos during the 1994 protests, which were made public in 2013 and matched the anecdotal accounts of the day. In an exclusive interview with EFE published on August 4, 2024 he outlined what he experienced that day, including witnessing government agents dressed as civilians firing wildly at demonstrators.
When the Dutchman arrived at the hotel opposite the Malecón, a Cuban approached him and said: “Keep taking photos and show the disaster that exists here in your country.” “While this was happening, a group of plainclothes police arrived at the Deauville and started shooting wildly,” he recalls.
Among the thirty photos that Poort gave to EFE, several can be seen of a man, wearing dark glasses, a white shirt and khaki trousers, with a short firearm in his hand. In one of them he is in front of the hotel, pointing upwards; in another he is pointing directly towards Poort and in others he is seen running towards where the protesters were.
Half an hour after those events, a patrol car stopped behind the photographer: “Three policemen ordered me to hand over the film and the camera. They grabbed me and, miraculously, I managed to get away and ran as fast as I could towards my hotel (…) I was able to take more photos from the window of my room,” he adds.
What is known now
What is known is that at least three Cubans were killed, hundreds injured, and 370 arrested.
Like their Chinese communist counterparts in 1989 , the Castro regime demonstrated its will to hang on to power in August 1994 no matter the cost in lives, and did it again in July 2021 with Miguel Diaz-Canel saying the quiet part out loud: “They would have to pass over our dead bodies if they want to confront the Revolution, and we are willing to resort to anything.”
On July 30, 2019 journalist Charles Lane wrote an important essay in The Washington Post on Cuba that reflects on the nature of dictatorships at large and that their survivability was based on their extreme ruthlessness.
Notes from the Cuban Exile Quarter, August 4, 2025
#5A Maleconazo at 31: When secret police shot into crowds of non-violent Cuban protesters with live ammunition
“Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.” – Elie Wiesel
31 years ago on August 5, 1994, a thousand Cubans marched through the streets of Havana chanting “Freedom!”and “Down With Castro!” They were met with brutal repression, including regime agents dressed in plain clothes shooting live rounds at unarmed demonstrators. Four years ago on July 11, 2021 it happened again, but this time it was not just in Havana, but across the island with hundreds of thousands of Cubans participating in over 50 cities and towns. The response of the dictatorship was the same as 1994, but this time the images reached the world almost immediately.
In 2013 photographs taken during the 1994 protests by Karel Poort, a Dutch visitor, were made public and confirmed the anecdotal accounts of that day. Cuban dissident Regis Iglesias described how the dictatorship militarized the streets in an effort to terrorize the populace:
A convoy of trucks crammed with repressive special troops and a vehicle with a 50 caliber machine gun on top patrolled up and down the long street.
Little has been reported on this, but some of the images and sounds remain. This combined with testimony of those who were there provide a better idea of what took place.
[ Full article ]
https://cubanexilequarter.blogspot.com/2025/08/5a-maleconazo-at-31-when-secret-police.html
Politics and Rights Review, July 9, 2024
State-Sanctioned Murders and Repression in Communist Cuba
By John Suarez
The Cuban dictatorship has maintained its grip on power for 65 years, committing numerous human rights violations that are extensive and challenging to encapsulate. This essay highlights three specific instances of criminal behavior by government agents over the past three decades, all occurring in July.
These instances include the violent repression of peaceful protests in July 2021, the murders of Cuban dissidents Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero on July 22, 2012, and the tragic deaths of 37 Cubans when the “13 de marzo” tugboat was attacked and sunk on July 13, 1994.
These events, thoroughly documented, underscore the brutality of the Cuban communist regime and the critical need for international solidarity with the Cuban people against their oppressive government.
[ Full article ]
https://politicsrights.com/
The Washington Post, July 30, 2019
A regime’s success depends on its dictator
By Charles Lane
“We have to warn the imperialists,” Fidel Castro thundered at a rally in Camaguey, Cuba, 30 years ago last week, “that they not create so many illusions … in reference to the idea that our revolution will not be able to resist a debate within the socialist community.”
He was alluding to the political upheaval sweeping the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the wake of reforms by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who had recently visited Havana. Communists had just lost elections in Poland, a portent, many believed, of change in Cuba.
“Never!” Fidel cried. Even in the event of “a large-scale civil war in the USSR,” even if the Soviet Union “disintegrated,” he pledged, “Cuba and the Cuban revolution would continue struggling and resisting.”
Seated among other foreign journalists a dozen yards or so in front of Castro, I could not quite believe what the 62-year-old dictator was saying.
Still facing a U.S. economic embargo, Cuba could not endure a cutoff of Soviet subsidies and the hardship it would bring. Refusing to bend to that reality, Castro recklessly courted his own downfall, either through a popular uprising or a fatal split in Cuba’s communist ranks.
Or so I thought: In January, the Cuban revolution finished its 60th year; in 2016, Castro died peacefully in his bed; his younger brother, Raul, who succeeded Fidel atop the regime in 2006, has semi-retired. And a transition to a new generation of party leaders, including a few influential younger Castros, is proceeding.
There is a lesson here about the relationship between economic factors — often said to determine political outcomes — and the human factor, which may be what really counts.
George Orwell summarized the point in “1984,” attributing it to Big Brother’s shadowy nemesis, Emmanuel Goldstein. As long as a repressive regime avoids foreign conquest and retains “its own self-confidence and willingness to govern,” Goldstein’s fictional treatise noted, it can rule forever.
True, a regime could be undermined by its own mistakes, especially if it incubates “a strong and discontented” middle class. However, sheer will can offset that: “Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.”
The mental attitude of Gorbachev was such that he lost confidence in the inefficient, repressive brand of communism in his country and tried to reform the system from within.
As Castro foresaw, Gorbachev’s economic and political liberalization heightened rather than resolved Soviet systemic contradictions, setting off a chain reaction that led to the USSR’s collapse.
By the time he addressed that July 1989 rally, Castro had already exhibited his own very different attitude. He had carried out a purge during the previous two months, culminating in the televised show trial of former high-ranking officials. This July, in fact, marks the 30th anniversary of the execution of four of them in Havana.
And it marks the 25th anniversary of another long-forgotten mass death in Cuba, the drowning of three-dozen Cubans on July 13, 1994, when the hijacked tugboat in which they were attempting to escape Cuba’s increasingly desperate economic situation sank, under suspicious circumstances.
Many blamed the regime, and August 1994 turned into a time of street protests and genuine peril for Castro — which he skillfully exploited by allowing a mass exodus of more than 35,000 people to the United States aboard makeshift rafts and boats.
As I watched Cubans parade to the beach with their homemade vessels that summer, I again felt sure that the regime’s days were numbered. Actually, emigration served as an escape valve for pent-up discontent.
Over the next quarter-century, Castro and his successors would help political allies take over Venezuela, using its oil to replace their former Soviet supply; they would successfully manipulate their people’s desire for access to money, travel abroad and other privileges; and, in 2014, they would agree to a thaw with the Obama administration, which produced diplomatic recognition and a flood of U.S. tourism dollars, but no political opening.
The Trump administration has reversed much of the Obama administration’s Cuba policy and tried to help Venezuela’s opposition force the Havana-backed regime into new elections.
Yet the government in Caracas still stands despite its people’s impoverishment. It, too, concedes nothing and survives by letting the discontented leave by the millions while imposing fierce repression on those who stay.
[…]
In the ruling circles of Havana and Beijing and Damascus and Pyongyang and Moscow, and probably Tehran, too, 1989 is remembered as something that happened to leaders who lacked the will to crack down, improvise – and wait out the West. If only it were clearer that they were wrong.
Washington Post editorial writer/columnist Charles Lane specializes in economic and fiscal policy.