I. The Day Cuba Lost Its Fear
Exactly five years ago, on July 11, 2021, something happened that many believed impossible. It began in San Antonio de los Baños, a small town in the province of Artemisa, and within hours it spread like wildfire through more than fifty cities and towns across the island: Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Camagüey, Holguín, Palma Soriano, Santa Clara, Pinar del Río… Thousands upon thousands of Cubans — young people, mothers, the elderly, workers, humble people from the most forgotten neighborhoods — took to the streets to shout a single word that summed up sixty years of pent-up longing: Libertad. Freedom.
It was the largest citizen mobilization in Cuba since 1959. No party organized it, no foreign power, no conspiracy. It was organized by hunger, by the blackouts, by the lack of medicine in the middle of a pandemic — and above all, by the dignity of a people who simply could not take it anymore. They came out with empty hands and full hearts. They sang “Patria y Vida.” And the whole world watched.
The regime’s response was immediate and brutal. That very afternoon, Cuba’s ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel appeared on national television and pronounced the words that will define him before history forever: “The order to combat has been given.” A head of state calling for civil confrontation against his own unarmed people.
II. The Price a People Paid: The Verified Facts
What followed has been documented, verified, and denounced by independent human rights organizations such as Justicia 11J, Cubalex, Prisoners Defenders, and the Cuban Observatory for Human Rights (OCDH). These are not rumors: they are verified facts, case by case, name by name.
- Nearly 1,500 detentions were documented by Justicia 11J and Cubalex in direct connection with the protests of July 11 and 12, 2021. On the first day alone, 542 arrests were recorded; the detentions continued for weeks and months, house by house, as authorities combed through videos to hunt down protesters.
- Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, a 36-year-old man from the Havana neighborhood of La Güinera, was killed on July 12 by a police bullet fired into his back. The officer was never charged. Other protesters, including a 16-year-old boy, suffered gunshot wounds.
- Dozens of minors were detained and prosecuted: Justicia 11J registered 57 minors arrested for their participation in the protests, some convicted of “sedition” and sentenced to more years in prison than they had been alive.
- The trials were a farce: sentences of 12, 20, and even 30 years in prison for demonstrating peacefully, handed down in proceedings without due process or effective defense — some announced, with calculated cruelty, just days before Christmas.
- The United Nations has ruled that the detentions of 49 protesters from 11J were arbitrary, in flagrant violation of international law.
III. Five Years Later: The Repression Has Not Stopped — It Has Gotten Worse
One might think that with the passage of time, the regime would have loosened its grip. The data proves exactly the opposite. Cuba arrives at the fifth anniversary of 11J breaking two sinister records, according to the Prisoners Defenders report with data closed as of June 30, 2026:
- 1,306 political prisoners and prisoners of conscience in Cuba today: the highest figure the organization has ever documented.
- 40 of them were detained as minors — also a historic record — and 16 remain incarcerated in adult prisons.
- From July 1, 2021 to today, more than 2,100 political prisoners have been documented in total; nearly 2,000 entered prison during these five years.
- In the last twelve months alone, the list added 264 new political prisoners: an average of 22 every month. The repressive machinery runs like a routine of the State.
- 458 political prisoners suffer from serious or chronic illnesses, and 53 suffer from severe mental health disorders — all subjected to the deliberate denial of medical care, used systematically as an instrument of torture.
- At least 322 protesters from 11J remain imprisoned today, five years later. More than half already meet the legal requirements for penitentiary benefits under Cuba’s own laws, and the regime refuses to apply them.
- In just the first half of 2026, the OCDH documented at least 1,949 repressive actions: police sieges, arbitrary detentions, summonses, threats, physical assaults.
And the pattern has evolved into something even more perverse: preventive repression. They no longer wait for protest to reach the streets; they hunt it down before it is born. They selectively imprison journalists, content creators, a rapper, an evangelical pastor, doctors, young people with influence on social media. The crime is no longer demonstrating: the crime is having the capacity to tell the truth.
Sixty-seven years of dictatorship. And instead of softening, the system perfects itself in the art of crushing the human person.
IV. A Sign of Providence: July 11 Does Not Belong to Fear
And yet, I want to pause here, because a priest cannot read history only with the eyes of an analyst. He must also read it with the eyes of faith.
July 11 is not only the date of the protests. It is also — and this is no coincidence for anyone who believes in Providence — the birthday of Cardinal Juan de la Caridad García Rodríguez, Archbishop of Havana, born in Camagüey on July 11, 1948. Today he turns 78. A shepherd whose very name is a program of life: Juan de la Caridad — John of Charity. Charity, that virtue which communism could never abolish, born on the very same day of the calendar on which, decades later, the people would take to the streets to demand their dignity.
It is also, in the calendar of the universal Church, the feast of Saint Benedict, Abbot and Patron of Europe — the man who, amid the collapse of an empire, planted the seed of a new civilization with three words: ora et labora. When all seemed lost, God was preparing the rebirth.
I see in these coincidences a message: the Providence of God has not abandoned Cuba. The very day the world associates with repression, heaven associates with charity and with rebuilding. God writes straight with the crooked lines of our history. Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, Mother of all Cubans, has not let go of the hands of her children — not of those imprisoned in the Combinado del Este, not of the mothers who stand in line to visit them, not of those who pray in silence because they are afraid to pray aloud.
V. Cuba: A Nation Greater Than Its Geography
There is another truth this anniversary compels us to contemplate: Cuba no longer fits within the island. Millions of Cubans today live outside our homeland — in Miami, in Madrid, in Mexico City, in every corner of the world — and yet we have not ceased to be Cuba. The Cuban nation has become a reality that transcends its natural limits, its coasts, and its borders.
The regime believed exile was an escape valve, a way to rid itself of the discontented. It was wrong: the exile community has become the living memory of the nation. We are the ones who remember when, inside, they force forgetting. We are the ones who speak when, inside, they force silence. And we are, above all, the ones who long to return — not as tourists in our own homeland, but as sons and daughters coming home — when Cuba finally has a freedom that guarantees democracy and human rights, so painfully absent from the communist project that has misgoverned the island for 67 years.
Every Cuban in exile who raises their children in the love of Cuba, who sustains their family on the island, who denounces, who prays, who does not forget — is building the homeland. The patria is not merely a territory: it is a people, a memory, and a promise.
VI. Never Forget
This publication has a single purpose: to remember, so that it may never be forgotten.
May Diubis Laurencio never be forgotten, shot in the back. May the 322 who remain behind bars for walking and shouting “Freedom” never be forgotten. May the 40 young people detained as children never be forgotten. May the mothers, wives, and children who have spent five years visiting prisons never be forgotten. May it never be forgotten that fighting against a 67-year dictatorship is not a slogan: it is a cross that hundreds of Cuban families carry today, at this very moment.
Forgetting is the tyrant’s final victory. Memory is the first form of resistance. And hope — that hope which does not disappoint, because it is founded on God and not on men — is the certainty that no dictatorship is eternal, because no empire ever has been, and because the Lord of history hears the cry of His people, as He heard it in Egypt.
Cuba will be free. We do not know the day or the hour. But we know that on July 11, 2021, the Cuban people proved that fear can be conquered — and that lesson can never be imprisoned.
Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, Mother of Cuba, pray for your imprisoned children, for your exiled children, and for your island that waits. And happy birthday, Your Eminence, Cardinal Juan de la Caridad: may God grant you to see with your own eyes the free Cuba for which your Church has labored so long.
¡Patria y Vida!
Data sources: Prisoners Defenders (June 2026 report), Justicia 11J, Cubalex, Cuban Observatory for Human Rights (OCDH), Diario de Cuba, and rulings of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.