That’s the idea with which one leaves Alcatraz (California, USA), the ‘final prison’, the federal gate where you ended up not when you broke the rules and had to go to prison, but when you broke the prison rules and were sent to the hellish maximum security site before going to the ‘real hell’.
The same idea is repeated in the Presidio Modelo (Isla de Pinos, Cuba), a prison-panopticon built in the 1920s, similar to an American penitentiary in Illinois, where the feeling of surveillance must have been overwhelming.
In settings that once functioned as superlative prisons, legendary criminals are often easily described and names such as Alcapone are noted, whom history places as antiheroes without much dispute.
It is not strange or meaningless because many of those who, like him, ended up in such places, carried on their backs a string of crimes that would put them in eternal debt to humanity.
But it is not always a sure thing to point to inmates as criminals and jailers as guardians of order, equivalent to heroes.
Not in scenarios where the fate of prison is derived, above all, from political ‘reason’ and, therefore, the meaning of who are the heroes and who are the criminals is reversed.
Within the walls of certain prisons, these postulates are not safe. Beyond Alcatraz and the Presidio Modelo – which was called at different times Isla de las Cotorras, Colonia Reina Amalia, Isla de los Piratas, Isla del Tesoro, Isla de los Deportees, Isla de Pinos or Isla de la Juventud -, in the settings of less extravagant prisons, which by their names would go completely unnoticed (Kilo 8, Tarea Confianza, Jóvenes del Cotorro, Canaleta, El Pitirre, Combinado del Este, Taco Taco, la Pendiente, Guamajal, Mar Verde, La Granjita), anonymous heroes await, unknown men and women who took to the streets on July 11, 2021, swept away by the glimpse of freedom they never had.
Perhaps, because they do not fit into the shoes of the typical hero, the impact of their steps has been limited, but the strength of an exile that supports the cause of political prisoners and demands their release in international forums, supports them.
The people, at this point, also find no dilemma in identifying their true criminals in the corrupt and illegitimate scheme that promotes a dictatorship.
Three years later
Today, three years after the popular uprising of 11J, more than 600 people remain deprived of their liberty for peacefully protesting in Cuba.
Under this headline, several human rights organizations issued a statement explaining that, even though three years have passed since these historic demonstrations, the situation in the country has not improved and, therefore, they point out, this has resulted in an increase in human rights violations.
“Between January and February 2024 alone, independent civil society organizations reported to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) nearly 300 repressive actions against human rights activists and defenders, political dissidents, journalists, independent artists, and family members of people deprived of liberty for political reasons,” reads the statement published on the eve of the anniversary of 11J, which has also generated numerous posts on social media, especially from people who demonstrated at the time and later managed to go into exile from where they can freely express themselves and commemorate the date with images and messages of support.
Their stories speak of the forced exile into which the Cuban regime forced them to silence them. According to the 2024 report on World Migration of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), more than 340 thousand Cuban nationals left their country in 2022, the year after the protests that also placed hundreds of people in jail for political reasons.
Repressors
Meanwhile, some of those who have acted as repressors in cases directly linked to 11J have attempted to benefit from asylum or other immigration relief upon reaching the United States. Their own victims have denounced them through human rights organizations, the media and institutions.
Likewise, a statement issued last June by the organization Prisoners Defenders praised a “strong condemnation” by the UN of the arrests of 11J in Cuba, thereby “demanding compensation and the release of 17 defendants accused of “sedition” in a single condemnatory ruling, something unprecedented in Cuba.
Among them are German citizen Luis Frómeta Compte and a young man with officially recognized mental disability, Walnier Luis Aguilar Rivera.
The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) also condemns the fact that all of these 11J protesters were victims of discrimination based on their opinion, declaring that the protesters were exercising their freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.
Even more recent is a claim by Cuba-Demanda based on the confession of three trial judges of participating in a conspiracy against the law to sentence four innocent people to four years in prison by order of the repressive authority State Security and the Communist Party of Cuba.
The organization demands that all proceedings in case 2/2024 and file 596/2023 be declared null and void (due to the control of Cuban State Security) and the immediate release of those convicted.
Although the regime’s mechanisms are intensifying to limit the exercise of the right to protest and freedom of expression, actions such as those described serve as a bulwark against helplessness. The only way to continue is resistance, in the face of an escalation of arbitrary detentions, short-term forced disappearances, surveillance, illegal summons and threats, among other systematic practices that organizations such as Justicia 11J denounce.
“The state policy, based on constant repression and intimidation of the population, requires urgent action to stop these violations of human rights,” they indicate in their statement on the occasion of the third anniversary of 11J, for which they call “on the State of Cuba” to “respect, protect and guarantee the human rights of all its inhabitants without discrimination of any kind” and demand “the release of people deprived of liberty for exercising their civil and political rights.”
