Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream: 60 Years Later in Cuba and the United States

"On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. led the Civil Rights Movement in a march on Washington. It culminated in his "I Have a Dream" speech." Like him, I have a dream of a free Cuba without dictatorship, where the rule of law is practiced and human rights are respected." - John Suarez, August  28, 2023 over Twitter. 

Sixty years ago on August 28, 1963 much of the United States was in the midst of a struggle to do away with segregation and civil rights activists were struggling to pass voting rights legislation. The march on Washington D.C. that culminated in Martin Luther King Jr.'s I have a dream speech sought to pressure legislators into voting for the legislation, and they succeeded.

This was a nonviolent revolution that sought justice, and changed the United States of America and 50 years later an African American president sat in the White House evidence that part of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream has been achieved.

Lamentably, on August 26, 2023 a white man with an AR-15 "covered in swastikas killed three Black people Saturday at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, before fatally shooting himself, local law enforcement said, describing the attack as racially motivated."

The three black persons killed this past Saturday by a white supremacist are Anolt "AJ" Laguerre Jr., age 19 Jerrald De'Shaun Gallon, age 29 and Angela Michelle Carr, age 52.

The struggle for a society in which people are judged for the content of their character continues, is still needed for the dream to be fully fulfilled.

More about #Nonviolence365 from @BerniceKing#TheKingCenter #WorkingOnADream #DreamAgainMarchForward pic.twitter.com/SXqRONOsad

— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center (@TheKingCenter) August 26, 2023

Let us compare this with the violent revolution that sought to end a dictatorship ninety miles away from U.S. shores in Cuba that in 1963 was just four years old. Sixty four years later and the Castro dictatorship that replaced the Batista dictatorship is still in power killing and repressing. Despite fraudulent statistics in areas of health care and education the reality of its failure on both fronts was made evident during the pandemic, and the continuing mass exodus of millions of Cubans demonstrates the nightmare that exists in Cuba today. Today there are over a thousand Cubans imprisoned for demanding to be free.

Let us also not forget that many of those who fought alongside Fidel Castro in the 1950s took up arms again against him in the 1960s in an armed struggle that although courageous, failed, and the new dictatorship wiped out all opposition: both violent and nonviolent for years.

A nonviolent movement began to emerge out of the prisons in the mid 1970s and onto the streets in the mid 1980s yet there are voices that claim that nonviolence hasn't worked and counsel either collaboration with the dictatorship or violent resistance.

Sadly, despite the successes of the civil rights movement in the United States by 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. found his nonviolent posture challenged by a black power movement that instead of accelerating change in areas of social and economic justice brought it to a halt. Reverend King warned black activists not to take the way of Castro and Guevara:

“Riots just don’t pay off,” said King. He pronounced them an objective failure beyond morals or faith. “For if we say that power is the ability to effect change, or the ability to achieve purpose,” he said, “then it is not powerful to engage in an act that does not do that–no matter how loud you are, and no matter how much you burn.” Likewise, he exhorted the staff to combat the “romantic illusion” of guerrilla warfare in the style of Che Guevara. No “black” version of the Cuban revolution could succeed without widespread political sympathy, he asserted, and only a handful of the black minority itself favored insurrection. King extolled the discipline of civil disobedience instead, which he defined not as a right but a personal homage to untapped democratic energy. The staff must “bring to bear all of the power of nonviolence on the economic problem,” he urged, even though nothing in the Constitution promised a roof or a meal. “I say all of these things because I want us to know the hardness of the task,” King concluded, breaking off with his most basic plea: “We must not be intimidated by those who are laughing at nonviolence now.”

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., like Gandhi before him, was assassinated on April 4, 1968 meanwhile Raul Castro has survived to the present day hanging on to power as the island of Cuba sinks into misery and despair with Miguel Diaz-Canel his puppet president, and his son Alejandro Castro Espin sharing power with his dad behind the scenes.

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas

Meanwhile two other courageous men, Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, opposition leader and founder of the Christian Liberation Movement, and Harold Cepero, a youth leader from his movement who had been a seminarian were assassinated on July 22, 2012 for advocating nonviolent change in Cuba. Oswaldo had managed to obtain more than 25,000 signatures in a Stalinist dictatorship demanding a vote to change the system and recognize the rights and dignity of Cubans. Like Martin Luther King Jr. he was killed but his ideas and example live on to inspire others.

The dream survives in others even when the dreamer has been cut down by the forces of repression and hatred. 

This is why on the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington the King Center is saying "dream again, march forward." For as T. S. Eliot observed in 1927 "If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause."

60 years ago yesterday, Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the U.S. from the Lincoln Monument’s steps. Yesterday images of Cuban martyrs and political prisoners were placed on this sacred ground.

Black Ribbon Day 2023: The Hitler-Stalin Pact that started WW2 which communists want to erase.

 "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." - Milan Kundera

Eighty four years ago on August 23, 1939, the world learned that Communist Russia and Nazi Germany had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, a non-aggression pact. It was named after Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop, their respective foreign ministers.

#OTD in 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed, carving up Europe and bringing half a century of #occupation to its eastern part.

Spheres of influence belong to the past. Every country has the right to choose its own security arrangements and allies. #StandWithUkraine pic.twitter.com/ECq7vCZgef

— MoD Estonia (@MoD_Estonia) August 23, 2023

Observers would have been even more horrified had they known of the secret protocols that divided Eastern Europe between the two totalitarian regimes. In actuality, what they dubbed a "peace treaty" was a war treaty.

Nine days later on September 1, 1939 at 4:45am Nazi Germany invaded Poland, launching World War II.

Rolling Soviet tanks and Nazi motorcyclists in Poland (September 1939).

Sixteen days later the Soviet Union exercising its secret agreement with the Nazis invaded Poland from the East and met their German allies in the middle of Poland. 

Nazi and Soviet soldiers greet one another in Poland (1939)

On September 22, 1939 the German Nazi army joined with the Soviet Communist army in a military parade in Brest-Litovsk and the two sides celebrated together.

Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov in a October 31, 1939  speech spoke candidly about the Nazi-Communist alliance, and ridiculed its victims.

"The ruling circles of Poland boasted quite a lot about the ‘stability’ of their state and the ‘might’ of their army. However, one swift blow to Poland, first by the German Army and then by the Red Army, and nothing was left of this ugly offspring of the Versailles Treaty which had existed by oppressing non-Polish nationalities."

Approximately 230,000 Polish soldiers and officers and thousands of military service representatives were taken captive by the Russians. The Soviet precursor to the KGB was the NKVD. "From October 1939, the delegated NKVD officials from Moscow heard the prisoners, encouraged them to cooperate and collected data. Only a few of the prisoners agreed to collaborate. The commanding officers’ reports included opinions about hostile attitudes of the Poles and a minimal chance of them being useful to the USSR authorities."

The decision to shoot the prisoners was signed on March 5, 1940 by seven members of the All- Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) authorities: Joseph Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria (proposer), Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, Mikhail Kalinin and Lazar Kaganovich.  

Thousands of Polish Army officers and intellectual leaders were taken into the Katyn Forest near Smolensk in the Soviet Union, shot in the back of the head or in the neck and buried in mass graves.

Secret protocols of the Hitler-Stalin Pact not only partitioned Poland but also divided up Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Romania into Nazi and Soviet "spheres of influence." The Soviet Union invaded and annexed the Baltic States in June 1940.  

Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov meets with Adolf Hitler (1940)

Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov in a speech delivered on August 1, 1940 while the Soviet Union was then still allied with Nazi Germany continued to describe their military alliance as a "non-aggression pact."   

 "A radical change for the better in the relations between the Soviet Union and Germany found its expression in the non-aggression pact signed last August. These new, good relations between the USSR and Germany have been tested in practice in connection with events in former Poland, and their strength has been sufficiently proved."

Another sign of Nazi-Soviet cooperation was the Soviet Union’s deportation of hundreds of refugees to Nazi authorities. Most of them were German anti-fascists, communists, and Jews who had sought asylum in the Soviet Union. 

Soviet and Nazi soldiers fraternize in Poland. Their alliance began 84 years ago today

This alliance ended on June 22, 1941 when Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, betraying his ally Josef Stalin.

"Stalin was shocked; he had received a plethora of warnings of an imminent invasion – notably from Winston Churchill, informed by British intelligence briefings. The communist dictator had refused to believe them," reported Agence France Press. Stalin preferred to rely on Hitler's assurances. 

Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, Joseph Stalin, and Soviet foreign minister, Molotov

Today, communist apologists will continue to defend Stalin and attempt to cover up this history of collaboration between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. It may also explain the real reason behind attacks on the legacy of Winston Churchill. His observation on the relationship between the Communists and the Nazis in his book The Second World War, Volume 1, The Gathering Storm (1948) is damning and accurate.

"Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of communism… As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into more hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their destruction." 

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the reckless strategy pursued by Stalin and the Communist International cost 22 to 28 million Russian lives alone in World War Two, and nearly led to the Nazi conquest and occupation of the Soviet Union.

 

 

 

Imagine what Cuba would be like today if Fidel Castro was never born.

Fidel Castro: A better world if he had never been born.

 

Totalitarians and aspiring totalitarians today celebrated the birth of Fidel Castro over social media, but others tried to imagine what state Cuba would be in now if it weren't for him.

What if Fidel Castro had never been born and his 64-year tyranny had never existed? Let us compare where Cuba was before 1959 to where it is now and speculate on "what might have been."

The economy
In 1959, in terms of per-capita GDP, Cuba was second to Chile and was doing better than Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and Panama. In 2015, Cuba lagged well behind the other four countries. It would be fair to say that in economic terms, despite billions in Soviet and Venezuelan subsidies, the past six decades have been a disaster for Cuba.

 Cuban death toll

There are tens of thousands of Cubans who would be alive today if Fidel Castro had never been born.

"University of Hawaii historian R. J. Rummel, who made a career out of studying what he termed “democide,” the killing of people by their own government, reported in 1987 that credible estimates of the Castro regime’s death toll ran from 35,000 to 141,000, with a median of 73,000."

 

Democracy restored in a post-Batista Cuba

Many of the leaders of the July 26th movement, who did the heavy lifting in the fighting in the field, and lobbying Washington DC to place an arms embargo on Fulgencio Batista in the spring of 1958, authentically wanted a democratic restoration in Cuba. As did the majority of the Cuban people. This is why Fidel Castro lied systematically through the 1950s and into 1960 denying that he was a communist and claiming to respect civil liberties and democracy.  

While Fidel Castro paid lip service to civil liberties, and locked up his compatriots, who had complained that communists were infiltrating the revolution as slanderers, he carried out the consolidation of power and formed a communist totalitarian dictatorship. 

Fidel Castro turned Cuba's diplomatic corps into a weapon of subversion and violence, recruited Nazis to train his repressive apparatus in the mid 1960s, and linked up with cocaine traffickers in an effort to target the soft underbelly of the United States.

Without Fidel Castro, the democratic transition in a post-Batista Cuba would not have been side-lined and the old democratic order that had done pioneering work on international human rights would have been restored. 

 

 

Nicaragua

If Fidel Castro had never been born, then Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas would not have taken power in 1979. Without the assistance of the Cuban secret police to take over Nicaragua again in 2007 and turn it into the dictatorship it is today with Cuban advisers and Nicaraguans fleeing the country.

 

 

 

Venezuela

If Fidel Castro was never born, then Hugo Chavez would not have had a mentor and the assistance of the Cuban secret police to take over Venezuela and turn it into the dictatorship it is today with Nicolas Maduro and the humanitarian crisis threatening the region.

 

 

 

 Human rights in Cuba

If Fidel Castro had never come into existence, then Cubans would not be going to prison for not sufficiently mourning the dictator's death in 2016, or worse yet providing a negative assessment of the regime he created. Thousands of men and women would not have spent decades in Cuban prisons for their political beliefs.

  

Opposition leaders such as Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, and Harold Cepero Escalante would not have been killed on July 22, 2012 by Castro's state security agents. Nor the games played by Castro to invite the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture in order to get positive media coverage but then not follow through. There would not have been the massacre of refugees slaughtered by Castro regime agents for trying to flee Cuba.

 

 

 Education

 Cuba in 1953 had the fourth lowest illiteracy rate in Latin America with an illiteracy rate that was 23.6%. Costa Rica's at the time was 20.6%, Chile's was 19.6%. and Argentina's was the lowest at 13.6%.  The rest of Latin America showed similar or greater gains without sacrificing civil liberties. 

There are also great concerns about the Cuban educational system today. First the issue of a system of education being transformed by the Castro dictatorship into a system of indoctrination and secondly following the collapse of Soviet subsidies the material decline of the entire system along with shortages of teachers. 

Without Fidel Castro intervention Cuba was on track to having a first class education system without sacrificing civil liberties. Now it has neither.

 

 Healthcare

Castro regime officials decided early on in the COVID-19 pandemic that they wanted to “be the first country in the world to vaccinate their whole population with their own vaccines” and were willing to let Cubans die while they developed their domestic vaccines instead of importing them, including from their allies Russia and China, in order to advance their “healthcare superpower” narrative.

 

According to official regime statistics, by August 2022 COVID had killed 8,529 of Cuba’s 11m people. But The Economist model estimates that the true death toll was up to 62,000 Cubans. This is not the first time that Havana has under reported numbers killed in a disease outbreak.

 

The Castro regime in the past failed to report Dengue (1997) and Cholera (2012) outbreaks in Cuba that killed scores of Cubans. Jailing those who warned the world of the threat.  In 2017 the Cuban dictatorship failed to report thousands of Zika virus cases in 2017.

On November 29, 2018 The New York Times reported that the  Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), a division of the World Health Organization (WHO) "made about $75 million off the work of up to 10,000 Cuban doctors who earned substandard wages in Brazil." A group of these Cuban medical doctors are now suing PAHO for the organization's alleged role in human trafficking.

This may also raise new questions on the relationship between PAHO, Cuba and reporting not only on outbreaks but the healthcare statistics that present the regime in a positive light.

Without Fidel Castro, Cuba would be another normal country that would be reporting health statistics that were accurate because there would be both an independent press and civil society to keep the government honest. Both were destroyed by Fidel Castro and his dictatorship.

 

 

 

Remembering when the Berlin Wall went up 62 years ago. Castro's visit in 1972 and how the Florida Straits were turned into a watery Berlin Wall

 The Berlin Wall and the Florida Straits: Deadly barriers to freedom

 Sixty two years ago today, in the early morning hours of August 13, 1961, the Berlin Wall went up and divided the old German capital city in two.  Western manufacturers provided the 150 tons of coiled barb wire to imprison East Germans behind the Berlin Wall for an entire generation.

 

In East Germany there are 136 documented cases of German civilians killed by East German border guards between 1961 and 1989 with their names provided. An estimated 1,000 were killed trying to cross.  

Nighttime wall-building on Aug. 13, 1961.  Photo: Rue des Archives/GRANGER

The East German government had given a clear Order to Border Guards on October 1, 1973 that left no doubt to their criminal nature:

"It is your duty to use your combat … skills in such a way as to overcome the cunning of the border breacher, to challenge or liquidate him in order to thwart the planned border breach... Don’t hesitate to use your weapon even when border breaches happen with women and children, which traitors have often exploited in the past.”

Fidel Castro visited Berlin in 1972 and addressed the border guards that policed the Berlin Wall to prevent East Germans from escaping to the West.

Castro encouraged East German border guards in their deadly work

 

At Brandenburg gate on June 14, 1972 in the afternoon (pictured above) he addressed the men charged with shooting East Germans fleeing to West Germany as "the courageous and self-denying border guards of the GDR People's Army who stand guard in the front line of the entire-socialist community." Later in the evening Premier Castro addressed the Nikolay Bezarin Barracks in East Berlin:

It is very important to know that the people of the GDR have great confidence in you, that they are truly proud of you. The comrades of the party and the citizens of socialist Berlin have told us with great satisfaction about the activity of the border troops, speaking with great admiration for you and for your services.

The state security apparatus in Cuba was trained by the East German intelligence service, known as the Stasi, the most brutal security apparatus behind the Iron Curtain rivaling the Soviet KGB in brutality and surpassing it in its espionage capabilities.  

The Castro regime and the East German communist regime had a close relationship for three decades. John O. Koehler on page 297 of his book Stasi: the untold story of the East German secret police outlined the relationship between the Cuban and East German intelligence services.

"The Stasi's first major task abroad was in Cuba, after Fidel Castro and Vice Premier Anastas Mikoyan signed the Soviet-Cuban pact on February 13, 1960, officially placing Cuba in the Soviet bloc. As Soviet arms shipments began, Mielke sent a number of Stasi officers of General Wolf's HVA to Havana. Led by Colonel Siegfried Fiedler, they assisted in setting up what became a first-rate intelligence service and an oppressive secret police. As a result Cuba's relations with East Germany developed as closely as those with the Soviet Union. Intelligence gathered in the United States by the Cubans was routinely shared with the Stasi. Much of the information contained in the dossier the Stasi maintained on President Ronald Reagan, for example, originated with the Cubans."

The Stasi enforced control at the Berlin Wall, and the Cubans who were trained by them, applied these skills in the Florida Straits and on the border with the Guantanamo Naval base killing many Cubans.

The actions of Cuban border patrols on July 13, 1994, and instances such as the June 1993 use of machine gun fire and hand grenades on defenseless swimmers trying to reach the U.S. Guantanamo Naval base are not aberrations. 

These were not isolated incidents, talking to Cubans randomly in Miami one hears accounts of others who died in the same manner trying to flee the island over the past six decades. It just happened to be one of the few times when it was properly documented and an official complaint lodged.

The men responsible for the July 13, 1994 tugboat massacre where given medals and described as heroes by Fidel Castro. This should not be a surprise when considering that he had praised the East German border guards that carried out orders to kill men, women, and children whose sole “crime” was trying to reach freedom on the other side of the Berlin Wall. 

Chris Gueffroy born 1968 and killed at the Berlin Wall 1989

Killings at the Berlin Wall continued until it was torn down in 1989. One of the last victims, Chris Gueffroy was born on June 21, 1968 and shot dead on February 5, 1989 trying to cross the Berlin Wall. Murdered at 20 years of age for the crime of wanting to live in freedom. 

The killings in Cuba continue to the present day, and like in East Germany, to end the homicides will require a change of system. 

Hiroshima and the horrors of progressivism: The ends do not justify the means

 "The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul." - Herbert Hoover, former President of the United States, August 8, 1945

Photograph of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. (National Archives Identifier 22345671)

Seventy eight years ago today the logical and sterile end of progressivism was visited on the people of Japan when the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Three days later Bockscar dropped a second one on Nagasaki. Despite American military leaders urging President Truman not to drop the atomic bomb the commander in chief had chosen otherwise.

Conservatives at the time of the bombings and through the 1950s and 1960s denounced the bombings as "crimes against humanity" for "the utterly unnecessary killing of uncounted Japanese." David Lawrence of U.S. News and World Report argued it was "not too late to confess our guilt and to ask God and all the world to forgive our error." William F. Buckley Jr. asked 'was it really necessary?' in a March 29, 1958 editorial and an article appeared in National Review harshly critical of Truman's decision. Russell Kirk, probably the greatest conservative thinker of the 20th century outlined the folly of progressivism.

"This doctrine of progress is a most interesting instance of the blind and foolish confidence of Americans in the God Progress. None of them—not Joseph Smith, not William James, not John Dewey—know what this progress is toward, not even what direction it is to take. Thus far, apparently, it has been progress toward annihilation, an end to be accomplished, perhaps, by the improved atomic bomb? We have dealt more death and destruction in the space of ten years than the men of the Middle Ages, with their Devil, were able to accomplish in a thousand."

Ronald Reagan, unlike his more moderate predecessors, rejected the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) and coexistence with the Soviet Union.  On August 6, 1985 President Reagan on the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima made the following observation and call to action:

We must never forget what nuclear weapons wrought upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet we must also remain mindful that our maintenance of a strong nuclear deterrent has for four decades ensured the security of the United States and the freedom of our allies in Asia and Europe. In Europe, these years represent the longest period of peace since the early 19th century. Peace has not made us complacent, for we are continually seeking ways to reduce still further the risks of war. As I have often stated, "A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." This anniversary is, therefore, a time not only for reflection but for action. 

[...]

I would also urge the leadership of the Soviet Union to work with us to achieve deep, verifiable, and equitable reductions in nuclear arsenals; to resolve questions relating to compliance with existing arms control agreements; and to establish a constructive dialog on ways to reduce the risk of accidental war. 

Times change and the rising tide of militarism in American society of the past 78 years has contaminated the political culture.

The film Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan has sparked the latest round of a healthy dialogue on the use of nuclear weapons on civilians. Scientists at Los Alamos in 1945 were divided on the matter. 

 Edward Teller, a Hungarian physicist who went on to create the Hydrogen bomb, expressed this ambivalence in a 1993 interview. Joseph Rotblat, a Polish-Jewish physicist left the Manhattan Project "on moral grounds when it became clear that the U.S. would continue to develop an atomic bomb even after Nazi Germany had abandoned its own plans for such a weapon." It is clear that German Physicists, who were Anti-Nazis, such as Werner Heisenberg did not put forth a full effort to develop atomic bombs for the Third Reich.

Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945

The massacring of innocents in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a great moral evil that Americans must recognize, repent and beg forgiveness. This does not ignore the war crimes of Imperial Japan but recognizes that there is a difference between combatants and non-combatants. Catholic Catechism number 2314 states forthrightly that:

“Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.”

American patriots need to recognize this in order to save the United States and the West generally. Conservatives are justifiably horrified by the radical changes in American society over the past half century. Arch Bishop Fulton J. Sheen in the essay“What Now America?” reflected on the impact of the atomic bombs:

“When, I wonder, did we in America ever get into this idea that freedom means having no boundaries and no limits? I think it began on the 6th of August 1945 at 8:15 am when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. … Somehow or other, from that day on in our American life, we say we want no limits and no boundaries.”

 Time for conservatives to reflect further on the two atomic bombs dropped over two civilian centers and the principle that the ends do not justify the means. The world has never been the same since those horrible days in August of 1945.

#5A Maleconazo at 29: When Castro's secret police shot into crowds of non-violent Cuban protesters with live ammunition

 "Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future." - Elie Wiesel  

Secret police in plain clothes fired live ammunition at protesters on August 5, 1994

On August 5, 1994, a thousand Cubans marched through Havana's streets, yelling "Freedom!" and "Down With Castro!" They were greeted with violent repression, with government operatives dressed in civilian clothes firing live bullets at unarmed Cubans.

It happened again two years ago, on July 11, 2021, but this time it was not only in Havana, but across the island, with tens of thousands of Cubans taking part in over 50 cities and towns. The dictatorship's response was the same as in 1994, but this time the photographs reached the world almost instantly.  

 

Cubans chant "Freedom" and "Down with Castro" on August 5, 1994 in Havana

Karel Poort, a Dutch visitor, took photos during the 1994 protests, which were made public in 2013 and matched the anecdotal accounts of the day. Regis Iglesias, a Cuban dissident, explained how the regime militarized the streets in order to scare the populace:  

A convoy of trucks loaded with repressive special forces and a vehicle topped with a 50 caliber machine gun patrolled the long street.

Little has been reported on this, but some photographs and sounds have survived. This, together with the evidence of individuals who were present, provides a greater understanding of what occurred.

What happened?

Five hundred Cubans had gathered at the Havana sea wall (El Malecon) to join a launch thought to be heading to Miami.  These folks did not wish to overthrow the regime, but rather to live in freedom elsewhere. 

They were met by the secret police of the Castro dictatorship, who ordered the throng to disperse.

Rather than defusing the situation, another 500 Cubans joined in and began marching along the Malecon, yelling "Freedom!" and "Down With Castro!" A hundred Special Brigade troops and plain clothes police assaulted the protesters after marching for a kilometer, firing live rounds into the gathering.

Secret police aiming handgun at protesters on August 5, 1994

29 years later and the full details of what transpired remains mostly silenced despite the pictures of regime officials pointing their handguns at the demonstrators combined with reports of the sounds of gun shots and wounded protesters echoing down through the years in anecdotal stories about that day. 

Eyewitness account

Ignacio Martínez Montero

 

Ignacio Martínez Montero posted on la Voz del Morro a first hand account of what happened that day that is translated to English below:

Then came the year 94 One hot August of that year's day, I'd arrived at my mother in laws home in Cuba and Chacón in the heart of Old Havana, near the Malecón, for that reason alone, after visiting my mother in law, I sat , like many, on the wall of the bay, very close to where still today the famous Casablanca launch travels in and out. That year was turbulent, constantly talking about boats diverted to Miami, and the tugboat. Maybe that's why the special brigade trucks arrived and attacked all of us who were sitting. 

Our response to this aggression was only to clamor for freedom. It has been said that we threw stones; but all that is a lie, the truth was that we were tired of so much aggression and without agreeing to we began to walk together screaming, Enough, Down with the revolution ... And before reaching Hotel Deauville, a battalion waited for us that attacked us with sticks and iron rods. It was they who made the big mess. They broke my left eyebrow and left me semi-lame. Yes, there were assaults and the aggressors had guns, but not among the civilians. One of the boys who went with us, who was called the Moor, even while handcuffed, they shot him in the torso and it was a miracle that he did not die. Who do you think paid for that? No one. 

They put us in a truck where they received us with beatings only to convince us to scream "Viva Fidel." They took us to the police station located at L and Malecon. Hours later I was taken to Calixto García hospital. There they attended to my foot and I treated the eyebrow wound; the medical certificate, never appeared. From there we boarded another bus and were taken to the prison 15/80, I could say "kidnapped" because nobody knew where we were. Some kids and nephews of my dad, who were with us, were released immediately. A boy could not take it and ended up hanged. No one learned of this; but we are many the witnesses who know what really happened that August 5th 1994, the day of Maleconazo.

Twenty-nine years later, the Castro regime remains in power, terrorizing, torturing, and murdering nonviolent dissidents, as well as shooting young black men in the back, but some Progressive Americans want to implement Cuban-style policing in the United States, claiming that we can learn a lot from them. They have no idea what they are saying. Unless, of course, they desire a totalitarian police state.

 

 We invite all people of good will to remember the victims of the Cuban dictatorship.

 

Diubis Laurencio Tejeda was a 36-year-old singer who was shot in the back by the National Revolutionary Police (PNR) in Havana on July 12. 

 

There are others, but they have not been officially recognized. 

 

This is the case of Christian Díaz, age 24, disappeared after joining the 11J protests. Relatives on July 12 reported him missing to the PNR in Cárdenas. Police told his father that Christian was jailed in Matanzas. On August 5th, officials informed his family he’d drowned in the sea and was buried in a mass grave. His family is convinced he was beaten to death. 

 

 

The events of July 11, 2021 and August 5, 1994, hopefully, will awaken more people to the true character of the Castro tyranny and the importance of standing in solidarity with the Cuban people, not their oppressors.