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Julio M. Shiling - 06-05-2026Castroism’s Empire Crumbles Leer en Español For decades, opponents of economic pressure against the Castro-Communist regime insisted that sanctions did not work. According to this conventional...
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Julio M. Shiling - 05-22-2026Honoring Pedro Luis Boitel and the Demand for Accountability Leer en Español This coming Monday, May 25, 2026, marks the 54 th anniversary of the death of Pedro Luis Boitel, a courageous Cuban...
The CIA Director’s Visit to Havana: An Ultimatum in Broad Daylight
Julio M. Shiling - 05-15-2026The CIA Director’s Visit to Havana: An Ultimatum in Broad Daylight Leer en Español The sight is repulsive on its face. A high official of the United States government, the world’s leading...
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Julio M. Shiling - 05-08-2026The End of Sherritt: A Victory for Helms-Burton and the Power of Targeted Sanctions Leer en Español After more than three decades of open defiance, Sherritt International—the Canadian company...
A Tale of Two Cities: Havana and Washington on May Day
Julio M. Shiling - 05-01-2026A Tale of Two Cities: Havana and Washington on May Day Leer en Español May 1, 2026, exposed two radically opposing political realities unfolding ninety miles apart. In Havana, the Cuban communist...
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Julio M. Shiling - 04-17-2026Crush Castroism Now to Finish Islamic Iran Leer en Español The Islamic Republic of Iran is reeling. Its senior leadership has been decapitated, its missile factories and air defenses lie in ruins,...
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Julio M. Shiling - 04-01-2026Remember the Combative Christ During Holy Week Leer en Español A dangerous distortion has crept into Christian theology across Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox traditions alike. Jesus is recast...
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Julio M. Shiling - 03-27-2026Helms-Burton Locks in Regime Change for Cuba Leer en Español As Donald J. Trump advances his second term with a bold initiative in Cuba, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is playing a central role in...
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The Cuban Uprising of 2021, a popular, national mass movement that began on July 11th, 2021, initiated a liberation process that is irreversible. The purpose is clear. The people of Cuba are fed up with communist tyrannical rule and are demanding and fighting for freedom. There are five things the Cuban military and State Security must know.
Transitional Justice will be exercised
Cuba will not repeat the errors of Russia, Nicaragua, and many of the former socialist bloc countries that did not initiate processes of decommunization and transitional justice. Understanding that upon the collapse of Cuban communism, the liberation, a new phase begins: the democratization process. Its biggest challenge is dealing with the Castro-Communist criminal past that some or many of you are responsible for. Transitional justice has three fundamental tasks: (1) identify the crime; (2) prosecute the criminal; and (3) indemnify the victim. Since there can be no rule of law, a bedrock of a free republican system of government, the application of transitional justice will be compulsory.
Digital age facilitates identification
Read more: 5 Things the Cuban Military and State Security Must Know
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Differences between cause and effect are often made. When seeking a remedy to a problem, the wrong prioritization could be fatal. To attend to the effect, while ignoring the cause, is a prescription for disaster. Nothing displays this truth more than in the political realm. As the people of Cuba are being brutally suppressed by the sixty-two-year-old communist dictatorship—in reaction to the peaceful uprising across about fifty localities across the country—discordant and contradictory pressures are being levied upon the American government as to what course to follow.
A proper distinction between what is the cause and what are the effects is fundamental in being able to draft America’s state policy that is consistent with its long-standing history of supporting natural rights and civilized governance. The United States must listen to what the Cuban people on the Island are saying. Demands for “Freedom,” “Down with Communism,” and “Fatherland and Life,” are what thousands of brave protesters are saying. No one is chanting “Food,” “Vaccines,” “Visas to the U.S.” or “Lift the Embargo” (blockade is a misnomer here).
Read more: The U.S. Must Listen to Cubans’ Forceful Calls for Freedom
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Cuban history recalls two emblematic commencements of the country’s two wars for independence, the Cry of Yara (1868) and the Cry of Baires (1895). Both sacrosanct events signaled that the nascent nation in arms was determined to be free and independent and on the path to achieving those objectives. This was realized in 1902. History will record July 11th, 2021, as the “Cry of San Antonio de los Baños” and the initiation of the 2021 Cuban Uprising, a seismic undertaking that marks a before and an after.
Both Yara and Baires were localities where the separatist revolts began in the 19th century. San Antonio de los Baños, a municipality close to Havana which houses a World War II air force base still in use and part of Cuban communism’s airborne offensive capability machine, was the ground zero flicker point that started the nationwide civic revolt of Sunday, July 11th.
Over fifty localities, far and wide across the archipelago that is Cuba, witnessed massive demonstrations demanding the end of the sixty-two-year Marxist tyrannical rule, overseen principally by the Castro family but ultimately sustained by a regime-driven communist belief system with the corresponding Leninist organization of society and power.
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This Sunday, July 11th thousands of Cubans took to the streets in numerous of the Islands cities calling for nothing less than systemic change.
For the over six-decade-old Marxist-Leninist state, this is indeed a most worrisome situation. The nationwide protests have caught many by surprise. For a dictatorship that prides itself on having one of the finest intelligence and repressive networks in the world, this proves that it is still vulnerable. Spontaneity, as Hannah Arendt always believed (correctly so), is one of the greatest fears of a totalitarian regime. One can rest assured that heads within the Castro-Communism apparatus will predictably roll. The most distinctive mark about these massive outpours of societal repudiation was precisely the spontaneous nature of these acts of civic rebellion that sprung out throughout the country, thanks to fissures within the state’s monopolistic media control that technology in the digital age has facilitated.
The chants included “Down with Communism,” “Freedom,” “Fatherland and Life,” “Down with the Dictatorship,” “Viva Free Cuba,” “No More Lies,” “Down with Diáz-Canel,” “Change,” “We Are Not Afraid,” and “Yes We Can.” Some of the Cuban cities where these multitudes voiced publicly their opposition to Cuban communism were Havana, San Antonio de los Baños, Palma Soriano, Guira de Melena, Santiago de Cuba, Alquizar, Cárdenas, San José de las Lajas, Morón, Bauta, and Santa Clara. According to sources of Periódico Cubano, local calculations by eyewitnesses place the numbers at close to 20,000 at most of these sites where the protests took place. It is worth noting that many of these demonstrations concentrated themselves within strategic targets before places with political relevance for the Castro regime.
Two key types of locations that repeatedly witnessed the highest decibels of social discontent and patriotic calls for regime replacement of the protests were in front of numerous Cuban Communist Party headquarters and police stations, both emblematic repressive instruments and symbols of the Marxist dictatorship. Miguel Díaz-Canel, the hand-picked figurative representative of Castro-Communism, made his way quickly accompanied by the regime’s elite political police troops, the Black Berets, to San Antonio de los Baños, the protest ground zero center and addressed the nation.
Remaining in that city for about five minutes but leaving behind the brutal repressive forces to crush the peaceful protesters, Diaz-Canel parroted the usual Castroist diatribe. The current Cuban dictator blamed all of Cuba’s woes on the United States (as usual). Immediately after, he slandered all those marching, by referring to them as “mercenaries,” “lackeys of the United States,” and “counterrevolutionaries.” Díaz-Canel, as part of his regime-formulated response to this challenge to its legitimation claim to power, claimed that “the streets belong to the revolutionaries” and called on “revolutionary Cubans and communists to go out into the streets” and challenge the anti-dictatorship protesters. Since the updated socialist magna carta (2019 Constitution) of the Castro-Communist regime calls upon the population to “defend” socialism by any means necessary, in a state with no rule of law, this is a license to kill for communism. Article 4 reads: “Citizens have the right to combat through any means, including armed combat when other means are not available, against any that intend to topple the political, social, and economic order established by this Constitution.”
The Castro regime as part of his repressive crackdown on this civic and peaceful revolt has logistically cut internet services for the general population in areas of popular demonstrations. Therefore, much of the details will be missing regarding the suppression. The Black Berets immediately in the afternoon began to savagely suppress the demonstration, for example, in San Antonio de los Baños. Tear gas was the least aggressive utensil used. The fact communist Cuba has a major air force base in this city, undoubtedly, makes it logistically important.
In the outskirts of Palma Soriano, elite infantry motorized divisions from Baraguá, home to the Castro regime’s largest military unit of its Eastern Army (Cuba has its Armed Forces divided along into three groups to avoid coordination’s for a coup), have been coordinating positions. Again, the loss of communication with opposition groups inside the Island has made it difficult to ascertain, at this moment, the full magnitude of the Castro government’s suppression effort.
As Arendt astutely forecasted, totalitarian regimes are only successful if they can structurally organize society and political power, along with the dictatorship’s objectives. Spontaneity threatens that ability to predict and control. Cuban communism will not forget this Sunday, July 11th. When people believe that all they have to lose are their chains, when they confront oppression, the oppressors are in trouble. Imponderables are tools of freedom against communism. Cuba is on the right path towards freedom.
©The Cuban American Voice. All rights reserved. Reproduction is prohibited without express permission.
Julio M. Shiling is a political scientist, writer, columnist, lecturer, media commentator, and director of Patria de Martí and The CubanAmerican Voice. He holds a master’s degree in Political Science from Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, Florida. He is a member of The American Political Science Association, The PEN Club (Cuban Writers in Exile Chapter) and the Academy of Cuban History in Exile.
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