One year after protests, Cuban leader sees way out of ‘complex situation’
HAVANA, Cuba (AFP)— Havana’s streets were quiet Monday as Cubans denounced a preemptive security clampdown on the anniversary of unprecedented anti-government protests while the president vowed an end to a “complex situation.”
A year after thousands took to the streets to demand food and freedoms, government opponents said on Twitter that they had receiving warnings from the police not to leave their homes, where some reported patrols outside.
They included the parents of protesters in jail.
“I am under siege,” tweeted Yurka Rodriguez, the mother of 25-year-old Yunaikis Linares, one of hundred placed behind bars by the communist regime.
“(If) they think that with two patrols they will shut me up, they are very wrong,” she added, using the hashtag #SOSCuba.
Mass protests broke out across Cuba on July 11 and 12 last year, with demonstrators chanting “Freedom!” and “We are hungry!” amid economic strife, medical and food shortages, and growing anger at the government.
They were the biggest protests in Cuba since the 1959 revolution.
A crackdown by the security forces left one dead, dozens injured and 1,300 people detained, according to rights groups.
Hundreds have since been given jail sentences of up to 25 years for such crimes as “public disorder,” “contempt” or “sedition.”
President Miguel Diaz-Canel last week described the protests as “a vandalistic coup.”
“If anything is to be commemorated this 11th of July, it is the victory of the Cuban people, the Cuban revolution,” he tweeted on Monday.
The president said he was “convinced that we will also emerge from this complex situation” amid a background of “constant economic, political and ideological siege.”
Cuba has for the past six decades been the target of US sanctions that Diaz-Canel referred to under the hashtag “#GenocidalBlockade.”
Orestes Sandoval, an 80-year-old queuing to buy cigarettes in the Cuban capital, told AFP he did not think there would be any fresh protests to mark the anniversary.
“With everything that has happened, I don’t believe anyone would dare to do such a thing.”