Castro regime shock forces attacked AP photographer

Some 300 people linked to the Castro regime arrived this Sunday with a large Cuban flag in central Havana shouting slogans in favor of the late Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution, and They attacked a cameraman and a photographer from the AP agency.

The reporter has been identified as Ramon espinosa, which was covering the massive protests when it was attacked by the shock forces of the dictatorship.

A series of unprecedented demonstrations with cries of “freedom! and “down with the dictatorship!” They exploded this Sunday in Cuba, as the country is going through its worst economic and health crisis in 30 years.

The demonstrations, widely broadcast on social networks, began spontaneously in the morning, a very rare event in this country, governed by the Communist Party (CCP only), where the only authorized concentrations are those of this party.

“Down with the dictatorship”, “Let them go” or “Motherland and life! – the title of a hit song –shouted several thousand demonstrators in San Antonio de los Baños, small town of 50,000 inhabitants about 30 kilometers from Havana.

“Libertad”, hundreds of others chanted on the Malecón, on the coast of Havana.

Other protests were reported and broadcast live via Facebook or Twitter, across this country where mobile internet only arrived at the end of 2018.

An impressive military and police deployment was sent to San Antonio de los Baños during the day, according to AFP reporters. The Cuban dictator, Miguel Diaz Canel, went to the city accompanied by party activists who marched shouting “Viva Cuba” and “Viva Fidel”, while throughout their journey residents continued to shout protests against the economic crisis.

Over the hours, Cubans began to report Internet outages by the authorities. Power outages and internet shutdowns are a tool the regime often relies on to suppress protests: The goal is that no video or call is shared and, moreover, that the world does not know what is going on there. Hermeticism allowed him to survive Castro’s brutal dictatorship for decades.

A resident, who requested anonymity, told AFP that she had participated in the morning demonstration, fed up with “the situation with the power and the food”.

Díaz-Canel, despite popular demand, pledged repression and called on “Communist revolutionaries to fight” Cuban protesters. “We are not going to allow any counterrevolutionary, mercenary, sold to the American Empire, to cause destabilization,” he said. And he threatened: “There will be a revolutionary response. This is why we call on all communist revolutionaries to take to the streets where these provocations are going to take place and to confront them decisively ”.

“The order of the fight is given, to the street the revolutionaries”, he dangerously voiced in a special television appearance.

“The Cubans are in a desperate situation (…) They are 60 years old, no one has wanted this government for a long time. There are blackouts. Not so much in Havana, but inside there are blackouts all night long, starting at 12 p.m. and they restore it in the morning. There must be a limit, people can’t take it anymore. It is a general satiety, perhaps now more aggravated by the question of the covid. Poverty existed before covid, and will continue to exist. Communism only generates misery and repression ”, commented to Infobae Hugo Landa, director of the digital newspaper Cubanet.

“What is happening is the perfect storm: hunger, lack of electricity, lack of hope, people die from covid, as government sends doctors abroad and gives vaccines to others country, ”he added.

The coronavirus pandemic, the first cases of which on the island were detected in March 2020, has plunged Cuba into its worst economic crisis in 30 years.

Every day, Cubans have to wait long hours in queues for food and also face a shortage of medicines, which has generated great turmoil in society. Economic difficulties have also prompted authorities to implement power cuts lasting several hours a day in large areas of the country.

The protests came on a day when Cuba recorded a new daily record of infections and deaths from the coronavirus, with 6,923 cases reported for a total of 238,491 and 47 deaths in 24 hours, for a total of 1,537 deaths .

Under the keywords #SOSCuba or #SOSMatanzas (the name of the most affected province), requests for help on social networks have multiplied, as have appeals to the regime to facilitate the sending of donations from the foreign.

On Saturday, a group of opponents called for the opening of a “humanitarian corridor”, an initiative that the dictatorship rejected. “The concepts related to the humanitarian corridor and humanitarian aid are associated with conflict zones and do not apply to Cuba,” the director of consular affairs and attention to Cubans residing abroad said on Saturday. Cuban Foreign Ministry at a press conference. Ernesto Soberon.

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