The episode might have remained a Cuban urban legend, a whispered moment of rare public dissent on the communist-ruled island, had it not been for recent improvements to the island’s mobile internet.
But this summer, Cubans across the country were able to live stream and watch the protests unfold in San Antonio de los Baños in real time — and join them. Almost immediately across the island, thousands of other Cubans took to the streets, some complaining about the lack of food and medicine, others denouncing high-ranking officials and calling for more civil liberties.
The unprecedented demonstrations have even spread to small towns and cities, where there are more horses and carriages on the potholed streets than cars.
In the city of San Jose de las Lajas, Marta Perdomo said her two sons, Nadir and Jorge, both teachers, immediately joined the protests as soon as news of unrest elsewhere in the country arrived.
“My sons came out because, like any Cuban, they were desperate about the situation,” Marta Perdomo told CNN. “They are fathers. Every day we have less here. There was no medicine. It was a very sad time with the pandemic. Children were dying, old people too.”
Cuban anger boiled over as food and medicine shortages – already a regular occurrence in Cuba – became increasingly dire. After years of government neglect, the creaking power grids were breaking down with increasing frequency. While Cuban officials have long blamed U.S. sanctions for the island’s woes, protesters on July 11 turned their anger directly against their own government over deteriorating living conditions.
A video shot by Marta’s son Nadir that day shows crowds of anti-government protesters marching peacefully down the street, with the demonstrators themselves looking shocked by what is happening.
“This is authentic! It’s spontaneous!” Nadir says excitedly in the video.
According to Perdomo, protesters in San Jose de las Lajas did not loot government-run stores selling hard currency items or overturn police cars, unlike in other cities.
As more and more Cubans took to the streets, it became clear that the Cuban government was facing its biggest domestic challenge to its hold on power in decades.
In a speech on state television, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel blamed the island’s economic woes on U.S. government sanctions, said the protests were the result of a subversive campaign directed from abroad, and called on loyalists to reclaim the streets from the protesters.
“We are calling on all the revolutionaries in the country, all the communists, to take to the streets, to all the places where they can repeat these provocations,” he said. “The order to fight has been given.”
Baton-wielding government supporters along with police began to disperse the protests. Hundreds of Cubans were arrested; some to clash with officials, others simply to film the commotion with their phones.
As protests in San José de las Lajas were broken up by government supporters and police, Nadir and Jorge Perdomo returned to their house and shot video on their phones, which they were able to post online despite government attempts to cut off internet access on the island .
“Nobody paid us,” Nadir says in the video, rejecting government claims that the protests were fabricated.
“We’re just reacting the way everyone else did.
Both brothers were arrested days later and charged with alleged crimes including public disorder, assault and contempt. Their mother, Martha, said the charges against her sons were trumped up and that they were being punished for peacefully speaking out against the government.
Cuban authorities say many of the arrested protesters are criminals and “counter-revolutionaries”. But in their court filings, prosecutors noted that neither Nadir nor Jorge had criminal records and both were “well respected” in their community. In February, Nadir was found guilty and sentenced to six years in prison and Jorge to eight years.
To date, Cuban prosecutors say they have convicted and sentenced nearly 500 people in connection with the protests in the island’s biggest mass trials in decades.
Preventing future protests
But international human rights groups say the Cuban government is using the prosecution to intimidate Cubans into protesting again.
“We found that prosecutors consistently prosecuted Cubans for exercising their fundamental rights such as the right to peaceful protest, the right to insult their president or the right to insult police officers, exercising the right to freedom of expression,” said Juan Papier, senior US researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW).
On Monday, HRW released a report on the protests that it said documented 155 cases of alleged ill-treatment against people participating in last year’s demonstrations, “including harassment, arbitrary detention, prosecution based on ill-treatment, beatings and other ill-treatment that in some cases constitute torture.”
The organization also accused the Cuban government of further cracking down on civil liberties to prevent more protests from taking place.
Marta Perdomo said she experienced the tightening of restrictions firsthand after being invited to Europe in June to speak about her sons to rights groups and lawmakers. When she got to the airport in Havana, officials there told her and another mother of a detained protester that they would not be allowed to travel.
“They said I was ‘regulated’ and couldn’t go,” Perdomo said.
Cuban authorities did not respond to a CNN inquiry asking why Marta Perdomo was not allowed to leave the island.
Although Perdomo says she worries about when her three young grandchildren will see their fathers again, she has no regrets.
“They didn’t have to come out, but they felt the pain of Cuba,” Perdomo said. “That’s why they came out. My sons were free that day.”
It remains to be seen whether the July protests will be remembered as a rare outburst of public anger or a new stage in the struggle for greater openness.
As the pandemic, US sanctions and the slow pace of reforms continue to batter the Cuban economy, the island’s authorities seem aware that despite their brutal crackdown last year, more protests could strike at any time.
In June of this year, hundreds of Cuban students at a university in the city of Camagüey began a night demonstration after the electricity in their dormitory was cut.
“Fuck these interruptions! Turn on the electricity!” they chanted as they hit pots, as seen in videos the students uploaded on social media.
Cuban authorities quickly restored the lights.
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