The Black Spring, 20 years later

By: Pedro Corzo - 19/03/2023

Guest columnist.
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To a certain extent, the repressive wave of Cuban totalitarianism against independent pro-democracy activists, doctors, writers, journalists and librarians, all sentenced to long prison terms, was a kind of knock on the face of many who refused to see and listen to the continued cruelty. of Castroism.

The arrests, 44 years after the Castros were in power, were not carried out against armed citizens or individuals preparing acts of sabotage, but against free men, aware of their prerogatives, who sought to fully enjoy their rights denied by the dictatorship.

However, what is most distressing is that two decades have elapsed without the Cuban police state having reduced the repression against the population, as shown by the figures for prisoners from the organization Prisoners Defenders, 1,066, with 11 new ones sanctioned last February. .

What is encouraging is that, although repression is an essential characteristic of dictatorships, prison, however inhuman it may be, has not led the victims to renounce their commitments, as Regis Iglesias, a former political prisoner of those bloody days, recently told me. which lasted from March 14 to April 4, 2003.

Iglesias, a prominent activist who served as spokesperson for the Christian Liberation Movement, eight years behind bars, expressed his pride because none of those arrested in the Spring had betrayed the cause, while in Cuba they remained, among others, Iván Hernández Carrillo and again they were in jail, for their indomitable libertarian spirit, Félix Navarro and José Daniel Ferrer, who from prison, in Mar Verde, Santiago de Cuba, wrote, "No to the electoral farce", referring to the spurious votes on the 26th of this month called by the Castro regime, according to the Assembly of the Cuban Resistance.

During the conversation, something that he considered of particular relevance, he said, "We were not 75, we were more, for example, Orlando Zapata Tamayo is not counted in that figure and he is the only martyr of that repressive wave," an attack in which he was also Arrested a woman, the economist Marta Beatriz Roque Cabello, another famous Cuban political prisoner.

Zapata Tamayo, bricklayer and plumber, a rebel with the most dignified cause that can be conceived, was serving a sentence of 36 years in prison when he decided in the Kilo 8 prison, Camagüey, to start a hunger strike that ended his life for 83 days. after.

We must keep in mind that the massive repressive acts of any dictatorship, Cuba, Venezuela or Nicaragua, are the result of the chronic fear suffered by tyrants, as was recently evidenced in the Homeland of Rubén Darío, when the Central American Bonnie and Clyde, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, exiled more than 200 people and stripped the citizenship of another 300, including the poet Gioconda Belli.

They are not unaware that they are sitting on the bayonets and that the oppressed are only waiting for the moment when they can rid themselves of the abusers. The chains are not to everyone's taste, as history has shown on numerous occasions. It is true that there is no shortage of repressors, but the fighters for freedom do not renege on their obligations.

Cuba has been the scene of numerous repressive waves. In 1959, as a consequence of the failed conspiracy in August, more than a hundred citizens were taken to prison, including Roberto Martín Pérez, who served 28 years in prison. Later, numerous arrests were made in retaliation for the large number of people who left for the mountains and plains to take up arms.

Almost simultaneously, perhaps the most brutal tidal wave of the dictatorship took place, the arrests after the landing of the Bay of Pigs expeditionaries in 1961. On that day, Fidel and Raúl Castro dressed up because they used the sports stadiums of the Island to lock up his opponents, 12 years before Augusto Pinochet, did so in the Julio Martínez Prádanos National Stadium, in Santiago.

That the spirit of rebellion has not been killed by the dictatorship we could appreciate in the protests of July 11, 2021, a glorious feat for all of us who reject the totalitarian Castro regime, which, as is to be expected, will not cease to implement abusive campaigns either. repression against the population.

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