11 July 2021 (11-j) the Cuban nation started the inexorable end of the dictatorship

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) Nothing stops the popular protests that started on 11 July 2021 in Cuba at the outcry of “freedom,” “down with communism,” and “we are not afraid,” along with “Homeland and Life” the song that has become the protests’ motto. The flame of freedom, lit on 11-J grows, and brings to light “the crimes against humanity” that are committed by the wielders of power with “State terrorism,” the economic, social, and political unfeasibility of the organized crime’s system, its terminal crisis, and the unavoidable end of the dictatorship.

Two years after it began, the 11-J has gone beyond being just a massive popular protest to be the final process towards Cuba’s liberation. It is more relevant than ever and now advances on the road to freedom with the help of the absolute and irreversible failure, the anachronistic, dogmatic, and criminal nature of the regime.

The violent repression against peaceful demonstrations, the illegal imprisonments with over 1,100 jailed political prisoners, the criminal use of the dictatorial judicial system with despicable sentences for innocent individuals, the assassinations, torture, forcible exile and migration, that among other acts of State terrorism Cuba’s dictatorship uses, only reveal the courage and valor of the Cuban people, their definitive decision to regain freedom, and the unavoidable end of the dictatorship.

When, on 16 February of 2021 the song “Homeland and Life” was launched on YouTube, a musical video of 4 minutes and 3 seconds, a song recorded in Havana and Miami, with six Cuban artists, “the strategy for Cuba’s freedom” was posed. The dictatorship understood this, opposed it with “Homeland or Death” and was defeated.

A verse of “Homeland and Life,” today is more relevant than ever as it hits the target, it says: “All has changed, is no longer the same. There is a gap between you and I. No more lies. My people yearn freedom, no more doctrines” “To stop the blood flowing for wanting to think differently. Who told you that Cuba is your property? Because my Cuba belongs to all the people!” “Your time is over, the silence has been shattered … the laughter is no longer, and the outcry is ongoing … and we are not afraid, the deception is over … sixty-two years (now 64 years) causing us harm.”

Homeland and Life is only the most notorious of the generational tendency that has brought to light the greatest failure of the so-called Cuban Revolution, the cultural failure. For many years generations of youth, born into and indoctrinated by the Castroist system, proclaim freedom, and point to the crimes committed by those who wield power by force. They peacefully ask for an end of the dictatorship and they do so with; music, art, indisputable reasons, hard evidence of the objective reality and they are repressed, imprisoned, exiled, tortured, and assassinated.

Cuba’s dictatorship is the Dictatorship-In-Chief of the State terrorism’s system -using fear as a method to indefinitely hold power- that has expanded through the Americas as 21st Century Socialism or Castrochavism, that controls dictatorships from Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and that has Para-Dictatorial governments in Argentina with Fernandez/Kirchner, Mexico with Lopez Obrador, Chile with Boric, Colombia with Petro, Brazil with Lula, all -bar none- accomplices of sustaining the Cuban regime.

The urgency to have freedom for the Cuban people -expressed starting with the 11-J- has become a universal outcry that no one can ignore because it grows and continues due to the popular courage, the courage of political prisoners who are risking their lives with hunger strikes, their families and friends who continue to cry out, the people who continue to protest, the solidarity of the peoples from throughout the world, and an ever increasing number of international organizations who decry the abuse and certify the existence of prisoners, torture, and the infamy of the regime.

Grievous omissions by democratic leaders and governments, and by international organizations who despite having a legal obligation, are stalled -issuing declarations and having policies to consider the effects- and are not focused on the cause and do not help the Cuban peoples to end the dictatorship. The position of those who contribute to the sustainment of the Cuban dictatorship under the pretext of helping the Cuban people is very critical because -by doing so- they are truly prolonging their subjection and delaying their liberation. The case of the European Union and its member States can be most notable because they sustain the allied dictatorships of its enemy that is Russia in its invasion to Ukraine.

The end of Cuba’s dictatorship is unavoidable because it has no peoples, no economy, no narrative, and has no options. There is total popular repudiation, the crisis is irreversible, and its productive apparatus is only terrorism and slavery. The narrative of the Cuban Revolution has been annihilated by Cuban youth who now fight for freedom and there is not anyone that will be able to sustain the parasitic dictatorship, as was done by the Soviet Union and a Venezuela surrendered to Cuba by Chavez at the expense of its own existence.

*Attorney & Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.

Translation from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas