The Burning Flame: We Cubans Want the Regime to End Now

A cry of “The reproaches can no longer be tolerated here on the island” This is what happened in the 50 localities of the country where the people rose up to cry out for the end of the dictatorship. All over the archipelago, there were never-before-seen footage of protests that one would think had taken place elsewhere in Latin America, except Cuba. Because Latin America has been bubbling for too long and Cuba has suffered from bitten lips for too long.

The flame that was lit on July 11 had been trying to ignite for some time. Since last year, there have been social sparks which made us think that the dissatisfaction of the citizens was such that it could explode at any moment. It happened with the protests of the San Isidro Movement, with the interventions of the 27N Movement and some other isolated events of the opposition which ended in coups that prepared the staging of this Sunday. A nationwide general protest that leaves gaps in the regime’s arguments that in Cuba those who oppose and demonstrate against the government are just people paid by the United States Intelligence Agency (CIA) or by foreign governments.

Now it’s people like the woman I saw open the door to her house, on the ground floor of a ruined building on Calle Galiano, Centro Habana, and come out to face several policemen who beat her and threw their batons at her. who shouted from the ground the fundamental desire that had moved an entire city: “What they do to me is just live and eat”. The lady, standing in front of the police in a demanding pose, yelled at them about the lack of medicine and food, about her diagnosis of COVID-19, about the ambulance that had to retrieve her ago A few days : “Do you think it’s a country? Is that the rubbish you’re defending? “. They were both handcuffed. They had both climbed into a police van as a crowd of people shouted “freedom, abusers, freedom”.

We Cubans can no longer support this regime and this puddle has exploded. A country completely starved for food and medicine, with a health system collapsed by COVID-19, plus an electricity shortage and heightened political repression, has finally exploded. An accumulation to which must be added all the deprivations that this city has suffered over the past six decades due to the inefficiencies and authoritarianism of the regime.

Massive peaceful concentrations of Cubans claiming their rights and freedoms, demanding the minimum for what they can aspire to in life – a daily plate of food, medicine for healing – have been suppressed by riot troops, brigades police and plainclothes policemen who fired, they shamelessly beat and arrested those who were demonstrating.

The scenes of bloody faces and repressed people who, hours later, began to circulate on the Internet had an exclusive reason: before the popular uprising, President Miguel Díaz-Canel ordered his forces to fight. “The order of the fight is given, to the street the revolutionaries”, he said in a frank disposition to violence to start a civil war in the country.

These are the real people who lost their fear and took to the streets: the complex neighborhoods, the marginalized, the rural provinces, the poorest, the people for whom today it is even more difficult than usual to survive in this country. Not a handful of artists or “instrumentalised” opponents. What happened was born of the spontaneity generated by the laziness of an inept government which cannot be concealed.

Cubans have moved from domestic discontent, home complaint and public assent, to action, and it has just opened a breach in the arteries of the regime’s heart. From now on, nothing will be the same in Cuba: the game has changed and these new rules bring the future closer. What has happened is climbing a launching pad that can launch us or the regime becomes even more bloodthirsty and dictatorial to impose its rules or the freedom of Cubans after 62 years of suffering.

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