To promote a peaceful transition to a Cuba that respects human rights
and political and economic freedoms
Cubans violently attacked for demanding protesters freedom. Wife described armed assault by govt paramilitaries on her home. Cubans three options.
"On July 11th, 2021, thousands of Cubans at various points throughout the Island participated in the largest act of rebellion in the history of the country. Not against the colony, nor against the dictatorships of Gerardo Machado or Fulgencio Batista, did this many people take to the streets on a single day to protest, to demand freedom and rights," observed Cuban independent journalist Reinaldo Escobar in his January 29th article in 14ymedio.
The price for this large scale act of defiance is still being paid in political show trials across the island.
On January 31, 2022 the NGO CubaLex reported over social media that "the Internet was cut off for mobile data in the municipality of October 10, at least in the vicinity of the court. Today the protesters continue to be placed on trial, there are six minors among them. Let's be vigilant." Thirty three protesters were charged with sedition, and six of them under 18 years of age subjected to these politicized proceedings.
Family members of the 33 facing long prison terms, and human rights activists gathered nearby at the Juan Delgado Park and held a nonviolent protest that was quashed by the political police and a rapid response brigade. Witnesses said that all the participants were beaten up and taken to the police.
Cubalex at 7:39pm over social media reported that Cuban officials had "violently detained women: mothers, aunts, sisters, grandmothers who were in the vicinity of the court. Cubalex listed the following activists arrested: Camila Rodríguez, Carolina Barrero, Tata Poet, Daniela Rojo and students arrested: Leonardo Romero Negrín, Alexander Hall They also arrested relatives Yudinela Castro, Yesenia Diaz and the entire family of Duanis, including the 18-year-old sister and the 60-year-old grandmother. Yunaiky's relatives were released because the grandmother fainted, reported Cubalex.
Mackyani Yosney Román Rodríguez (HRW)
Patrick Oppmann, is the long time CNN correspondent in Havana, and to remain in Cuba requires being "flexible" with regime demands on coverage. Nevertheless, his most recent report provides important information on the plight of 11J cuban political prisoners.
In a brief phone call from El Guatao, the women's prison in Havana where she is being held, protestor Mackyani Yosney Román Rodríguez decried the "awful" conditions of her incarceration. Román said she was arrested in July after clashes with police, whom she blamed for causing the violence in the working-class Havana neighborhood of La Guïnera where she lived. "It was terrible, the police arrived and just started shooting," she said. Román, 24, said she is charged with a long list of crimes, including sedition, and faces 25 years in jail. Two of her brothers also face lengthy prison sentences for allegedly taking part in the protests, she said.
Daniel Joel Cárdenas Díaz, a husband and father of two, also took part in the July 11, 2021 protests. His wife managed to record what happened next.
"Two days later, after police had quelled the protests across much of the island, [Marbelis Vázquez Hernández] said that police and Cuban "black beret" special forces appeared outside the couple's home and began battering down the door. Vázquez managed to record two brief videos with her phone as police forced their way into the home, guns drawn. She says she hid the phone between her legs to keep it from being taken and sheltered with her young children as police fired at her husband. She said that one of the rounds grazed the back of his head. 'When I saw him on the floor they were hitting him with a baton," she said. "He was hurt on the floor covered in blood, in a huge pool of blood. I thought he was dead.' While the video Vazquez took shows a pool of blood on the floor of her home, CNN was not able to independently confirm the extent of her husband's injuries.In a third video taken after police took her husband away, Vázquez shows the blood on the floor and cries to her neighbors who have gathered at her front door, 'They have destroyed my house!'"
Marbelis Vázquez Hernández, Daniel Joel Cárdenas Díaz and their two young children.
Cuban independent journalist Reinaldo Escobar in an essay published in Havana on January 29th, 2022 in 14ymedio reveals that Cubans who live on the island subject to the Castro dictatorship have only three options: "obedience, escape, or rebellion." Escobar offers an outline of each, and concludes with the costs to be paid for assuming each one of the three available options.
"The price of obedience is the surrender of oneself. The prize, the peace of not ending up in jail, and the security of counting on the assigned quota of misery."
"The price [of escape] is being uprooted, referring to metaphorical cultural, spiritual, familial roots which ground an individual to a place. The prize, if one arrives, are the fruits: the tangible fruits obtained through one’s own efforts."
"The price of rebellion during the last 63 years has been high: executions, long prison sentences, attacks on your reputation, prohibitions on leaving the country, the impossibility of practicing your profession. The prize is reduced, for the moment, to the satisfaction of knowing that you are doing what is correct."
This Castro regime's model of repression has been expanded to Venezuela, and Nicaragua, and threatens to expand elsewhere. Over the past twenty years both Russia and China have been aiding in this effort.
Mary Anastasia O'Grady in her January 30, 2022 column "Putin Is Already in Cuba and Venezuela: Now Russia and China are helping Maduro militarize the Colombian border," reveals the fact that the Russians are already embedded in Latin America, together with China, in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, and are now threatening the sovereignty of Colombia.
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