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MIAMI – Jose Carlos Melo had never protested before the hot July morning last year when Cubans began marching in a small town outside Havana. Within hours, people were calling for a demonstration in the capital.
With his mother’s blessing, the restaurant manager ventured out to join the thousands chanting “Freedom!” and “It’s Over!”
Melo will be with tear gas and pushed to the ground. But on Instagram and in television interviews in the days that followed, he recounted it as the happiest day of his life — a turning point that seemed to mark a before and after in Cuba’s history.
What followed was more complicated. State Security agents are lurking outside his home. His mother was fired from her job. Police detained Mello, 27, three times, threatening to press charges that could lead to substantial jail time.
By December, he decided there was only one way forward: go to jail or leave.
“So I left,” he explained in Miami.
Cubans, shattered by a pandemic and fueled by social media, are confronting their police state
A year later internet-fueled protest rocked Cuba last July 11, many who took to the streets are now defecting, joining one of the largest exodus from the island since Fidel Castro launched the revolution in 1959.
Some are activists who have been detained, threatened and harassed. Others are teachers, farmers and parents of young children who have decided it would be better to leave as the economy continues to collapse, the country has not undertaken significant reforms and Nicaragua has lifted the visa requirement that made it easier to travel there.
The flight is taking away much of the communist state’s youth at a time when the nation’s population is growing at its slowest rate in six decades. It also presents a challenge for the opposition, as some of the most vocal leaders for change are fleeing the island. Meanwhile, in Miami, the new arrivals are having a hard time – many of them do not have work permits, rents are at record highs and families are trying to accommodate the new arrivals on sofas and air mattresses.
Wilfredo Allen, a lawyer in Miami, says he receives 20 to 30 emails a day from people who are considering leaving Cuba, are waiting at the border or are already in the United States. He calls the movement “unstoppable.”
One defining aspect of the newcomers: “Almost every Cuban I’ve dealt with is like that young. And they leave because they have no hope.”
“Fatherland and Life”
Estimates of the number of people who marched last summer range from 100,000 to half a million – a tiny fraction of the island’s 11.1 million people, but a significant fraction in a country where mass protests are rare. Demonstrations spread from major cities like Havana and Santiago de Cuba to towns like Aguacate, where several people gathered in the square to shout “Patria y Vida!” — Fatherland and Life, a play on the revolutionary slogan “Patria o Muerte”: Fatherland or death.
The days that followed were both exhilarating and terrifying. Melos audio shows openly disagree on Twitter Spaces attracted hundreds of listeners. Activists formed a group called Archipiélago and began planning another march for November. International news outlets interviewed young, disillusioned Cubans and asked if the island was on the brink of another revolution.
But the repression had already begun. US-based human rights groups Cubalex and Justicia 11J say more than 1,400 people have been arrested since the protests. A year later, about 700 are still behind bars. The most common charges include public disorder, contempt and riot. Several dozen people are facing military courts. Two of the most prominent detainees – rapper Mikel “El Osorbo” Castillo Perez and artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara – were recently sentenced to nine and five years in prison.
Cubans who joined the protests in July now face heavy sentences
For many others, however, the consequences are less public. Melo’s landlord kicked him out of his apartment and his internet was cut multiple times. Saili Gonzalez, 31, who ran a bed and breakfast in the central city of Santa Clara, said pro-government mobs threw eggs and rocks at her home. State security agents kept Eliexer Marquez Duani, 40, a rapper known as El Funky, who helped write the protest anthem “Patria y Vida.”
Still, many of them continued to organize and demand greater economic and political freedoms.
“After July 11, I couldn’t take it anymore,” Gonzalez said. She expressed her frustration on Instagram, where she posted videos calling for the detained protesters to be released and separately organized two protests.
Then came November. A day before Archipiélago’s planned march, security forces blocked access to and from the home of the group’s leader, Yunior García. Stuck inside, he reached out carrying a white rose through his window – and left for Spain a few days later. Others, including Melo, were prevented from leaving their homes. Some protest leaders, startled, discouraged people exit, considering it too risky.
Cuban security forces quelled the planned national protest
“It’s hard to make it on the street when your leader is gone,” Melo said. “And everyone who was on the street was a police officer. You see people with guns – you don’t go out into the street.
“People were afraid.”
“please don’t let me die”
Garcia’s departure was followed by others.
Rapper Dennis Solis — a member of the San Ysidro artist movement whose 2020 arrest sparked an earlier rebellion — fled to Serbia. El Funky left after receiving an invite to the Latin Grammys. YouTuber Dina Stars, who was detained while giving a live TV interview last July, went to Madrid. The teenager caught in a viral photo waving a bloodied Cuban flag on July 11 is also in Spain.
In Cuba, a desperate search for a glass of milk
But most of the fleeing young Cubans arrive in Miami – the city of exiles.
More than 140,000 Cubans have been arrested by the U.S. at the Mexican border since Oct. 1, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, usually after long journeys that begin with an expensive flight to Managua. The exodus eclipsed the mass lifting of boats since 1980, when Fidel Castro opened the port of Mariel to anyone who wanted to leave — and 125,000 people did.
The poorest today continue to flee by sea. U.S. Coast Guard officials have apprehended more than 2,900 Cubans since Oct. 1 — far exceeding the 838 in the previous fiscal year.
Yariel Alfonso Puerta, 27, left in a homemade sailboat made of sheet metal and wooden planks a day before he was to stand trial for insubordination following a protest in July last year. His mother said, “I’m not sure how he got out.”
The US Coast Guard stopped Puerta in international waters. He was put aboard a boat carrying a cellphone that contained a video showing a dozen undercover agents forcing him into a white police car and a letter.
“I am going to the United States on a raft because I am afraid,” he wrote. “Please don’t let me die.”
As Biden eases Trump’s sanctions, Cubans hope for economic improvement
Miami where the immigrants arrive is a city where even middle-class families are constantly pushed out. The average asking price for a rental in May was over $3,100. Income inequality is on par with that of Panama and Colombia. But family ties and the allure of a city where Spanglish is the lingua franca still dawned on many.
Arletis Relova, a 29-year-old former teacher, lives with her cousin in an efficient apartment in Miami. The place is small, but she believes it is better.
“In Cuba, you don’t even have detergent to wash your clothes,” she said one recent morning as she lined up with other Cubans outside a social services agency.
Now Relova and others have a different problem: They still can’t work. Although many Cubans are released into the United States after brief detention by the US Border Patrol, most must wait months to apply for and receive a work permit. Meanwhile, many are starting off-the-books jobs in car washes and factories. Most cannot legally drive – or afford a car. Even celebrities like El Funky rely on friends to get around.
On on a cloudy spring evening, he commanded the stage at La Tropical, a beer garden in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood modeled after one founded in Havana in 1888. He was one of three artists involved in “Patria y Vida” still living in Cuba when the song was released last year. Cuban Americans young and old gathered in front of the stage to sing along.
El Funky began his set wearing a Miami Heat jacket, but by the end of the performance he had removed it to reveal a t-shirt featuring El Osorbo, his arrested associate.
Marquez says he’s still not used to life in Miami. Shortly after arriving, his father died. He takes some comfort in knowing that his father, watching from afar, saw him receive two Grammy Awards. But he described himself as “struggling”.
He has not made any money from “Patria y Vida”. To do that, he says, he’ll have to join an American artist licensing organization — which requires a Social Security number, which he doesn’t yet have. These days he lives in a small, spartan apartment. When he comes out, people recognize him and applaud him.
“I feel good because everything I did, I did it with heart,” he said. But “I feel sad inside.”
Ted Henken, a Cuba scholar at Baruch College who wrote a book about the island’s digital awakening, notes that technology allows angry citizens to spark a protest in days that would have taken months to organize in the past. But that doesn’t mean they have the tools and strategies to change the status quo.
“In a way, it’s a bitter lesson,” Henken said. “Because the July protests happened with almost no central organizational unit, personality or set of demands.”
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