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-two 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. The uprising became known as the Maleconazo.
During the summer of 1994, Cubans were angry. The so-called “Special Period,” marked by scarcity and hunger, was underway. News was also circulating 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.
State Security agents, political police, and paramilitaries shot protesters and beat them with batons and clubs. In Havana, military trucks carrying special troops and .50-caliber machine guns patrolled the streets.
The Castro government made clear its willingness to fire on unarmed, nonviolent demonstrators. Cubans were beaten, shot, and jailed. Thirty-two years later, the full scale of the 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. These images 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 described what he experienced, including 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 show a man wearing dark glasses, a white shirt, and khaki trousers, holding a short firearm. In one, he stands in front of the hotel pointing upward; in another, he aims directly toward Poort; in others, he runs toward the protesters.
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
At least three Cubans were killed, hundreds were injured, and 370 were arrested.
Like their Chinese communist counterparts in 1989, the Castro regime demonstrated its determination to cling to power in August 1994, no matter the cost in lives. It did so again in July 2021, when Miguel Díaz-Canel said 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 reflected on the nature of dictatorships more broadly, noting that their survival rests on the extreme ruthlessness of its dictator.
Maleconazo at 32 years
“Freedom did not come that August, but nothing would be the same.”- Regis Iglesias, spokesperson, Christian Liberation Movement
32 years ago, on August 5, 1994, over a thousand Cubans marched through the streets of Havana chanting “Freedom!”and “Down With Castro!” They were met with brutal repression, including regime agents shooting at unarmed demonstrators. After things were under control the dictator Fidel Castro appeared on the scene and opened the borders. Before that announcement fleeing refugees had confronted snipers and grenades. The end result was another mass exodus of Cubans.
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From the archives
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.