On July 11, 2021, Cuba changed. It changed its history; the conceptions about the character of Cubans; the domestic and international understanding of our people’s “immobility”; the way the State, the Government, and specifically, its repressive forces related to the citizenry.

The fact that the large-scale demonstrations occurred and for acts of popular protest to have continued in various places in Cuba over the past three years, Cuba had to have changed. On July 11, 2021, we witnessed the overflow of people’s energies, retained for decades and efficiently controlled by the Communist Party and government.

At the beginning of July 2021, protest was in the air; it was palpable. For that reason, I do not accept the narrative of a conspiracy to create chaos in Cuba. There is no greater chaos than hunger, oppressive heat, lack of medicines, hospitals full of COVID-19 patients, and the anguish of people because vaccinations had not reached them. It cannot be hidden that the situation was inflamed by social networks, which were filled with the horrors of Cuba.

Since the end of 2020, Cuba was different. The tension between the Government and the new opposition was noticeable, now composed of artists, intellectuals, feminist activists, those who defend the rights of LGBTIQ+ people; anti-racist activists, animal rights activists, all willing to use public spaces, to demonstrate for their civil and political rights as well as their social rights (which increasingly resembled the limitations of the former).

It was known that the closure of the US Embassy and the inability to obtain a visa in Havana would worsen Cuba’s social situation. For decades, our people have found an effective way to express political sentiment, to show direct negative power, through exile. The disappearance of this escape route and political, economic, and social outcry brought desperation to the surface.

The new generations of Cubans did not romanticize poverty as many of us did in previous years —when we still thought our sociopolitical model was altruistic, environmentalist, thrifty, humanist, caring, egalitarian, and so on. We gradually entered the raw world of material and spiritual survival.

After July 11, 2021, the Cuban people learned —those who still did not know— that the government was paternalistic and protective only out of propaganda necessity and, in any case, when its intervention, control, supervision, and responsibility would yield undeniable political gain.

At the moment when someone might have hoped for the high-mindedness of a government responsible for the destruction of our lives and hopes, the president gave the combat order. Then, repression did not end until it counted hundreds of people detained, violated, beaten, and later sentenced to imprisonment without considerations, without forgiveness, without understanding the causes of the protests, without putting themselves, for a second, in the shoes of the desperate.

The Communist Party that leads the socialist state has been, until today, incapable of making a moderately Marxist interpretation of the events of July 2021. The official interpretation, which has also been that of the country’s courts —what a coincidence!— is that they were acts of vandalism aimed at subverting the constitutional order, involving the destruction of public property and endangering social peace, and that they were also violent demonstrations organized from Miami by members of the Cuban opposition in exile in coordination with the US government.

In this way, the door was closed to any possibility of political dialogue about the causes of the demonstrations, the historical events, and a war was declared— not just cultural, as the government has argued— to every form of criticism, opposition, dissidence, inside and outside Cuba that proposes urgent changes in political, economic, social, legal, and financial terms.

Because the motivations of July 2021 remain alive and because by July 2024 there are more accumulated reasons, there is still a waiting, inside and outside Cuba, for events similar to those of that July 11th.

To the well-known political complacency of part of our people, who aspire for Cuba’s authoritarian regime to cease because “something” happens or because the Government decides to move entirely to a Pacific island, must be added those who dream daily of another July 11, as if that had been the most energizing moment in the lives of those who long for change in our country.

We keep waiting for July 11 to happen again; but in reality, when something similar occurs, it won’t be the same. Neither the government will be the same, nor will the demonstrators ask the leaders for what they have asked tirelessly and not been given.

July 11 is the day of rebellion, but it is also the day of repression and the beginning of a tragedy for hundreds of families in Cuba who have had to suffer loved one’s imprisonment and the stigma imposed by the government. For this reason, some wait for a new July 11, but many others only hope that their sons and daughters get out of prison and the horror.

Protests will continue, even if there is little strength left after waiting in lines for food, the heat, the blackouts, the mosquitoes, the dengue, with luck and acidity in the stomach, because one cannot live forever in oppression. Hunger is endured by conviction or resisted by a higher interest. Injustice is unbearable for even a moment. The injustice that means the hunger for almost everything suffered in Cuba can have no other outlet than protest, the cry of pain, the constant demand for freedom and rights for all.

This article was translated into English from the original in Spanish.