The protest that broke the silence in Cuba: ‘It changed my whole life’

Four years later, when Andy García Lorenzo was released, the Castro regime was still in power. The country was a worse place than before, with less electricity, less water and less food, or food that was more expensive. His neighborhood in Santa Clara was no longer the same either, or at least not the one he had known until the age of 23, when Cuba’s political police imprisoned him. The house remained unchanged, “as if frozen in time,” but his grandmother had died, his parents had grown old, the neighbor he had left behind as a child was now a teenager, and the one who had been a teenager had either already left Cuba or was looking for a way to leave. García Lorenzo had changed too. Prison did not tame him; if anything, it hardened him and made him “freer.” The events of July 11, 2021, still echo in his mind.

“It made sense to take to the streets. It changed my whole life; it gave me a purpose,” García Lorenzo says by phone.

The protest did not come to him; he went looking for it. He wanted to shout, to merge his personal anger with the people’s collective rage. He headed to the park, but no one was there. He walked down the boulevard, and still found nobody. Then a man on a bicycle told him that the gathering was taking place outside the Villa Clara Provincial Court. So he went there.

News was emerging of people taking to the streets across almost the entire island, something unprecedented and very real, almost unbelievable in a country accustomed to not making demands, to not occupying public space.

Once again, Cuba had reached a breaking point. The fragile healthcare system had finally buckled under the strain of Covid-19. Pandemic-related airport closures had sharply reduced tourist arrivals. The national economy had contracted even further. All of this unfolded amid growing political repression, now visible in real time thanks to an island that was becoming increasingly connected to the internet. People felt they had little left to lose, because whatever guarantees the Revolution had once promised them, the Revolution itself had already taken them away.

On July 10 of that year, a Facebook user operating under the pseudonym Danilo Roque posted a message to his neighbors in San Antonio de los Baños, a municipality southwest of Havana: “Tired of having no electricity? Upset because you can’t sleep for three days? Sick of putting up with the brazen behavior of a government that doesn’t care about you? It’s time to go out and demand,” Roque wrote. “We demand that, if we have no food, they at least let us sleep. To the streets. Get out of the government, you opportunistic communists. This Sunday, July 11 in the morning, church park. See you there.”

No one, not even the organizers themselves, expected the call to resonate. They had issued similar appeals before, only to be met with indifference from their neighbors. But on July 11, a group of weary and frustrated people gathered in the church park in San Antonio de los Baños and marched onto Real Street like a tide that had finally been unleashed. What began as complaints about shortages of electricity, water and food had evolved into something larger and more decisive: a demand for freedom, encapsulated in the slogan “Patria y Vida” (“Homeland and Life”).

The protest quickly spread to some 62 locations across nearly the entire country. Cuban exiles gathered in parks, public squares, embassies and consulates around the world. Cuban flags were raised. People did what the Castro government had spent decades teaching them they could not do: they disobeyed.

A 90-year-old woman picked up a cooking pot and declared that she was tired of struggling just to get by. Some people cried with joy. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel arrived in San Antonio de los Baños under heavy security to quell the protest and was greeted with a barrage of plastic water bottles.

It was then that the police went after García Lorenzo. Like more than 1,500 others, he became a political prisoner. Among those arrested were mothers, fathers, minors, the sick and pregnant women. Some received sentences of up to 20 years in prison with no avenue for appeal. García Lorenzo himself was sentenced to four years behind bars on charges of contempt, public disorder and assault.

He can still close his eyes and feel the blows against the prison bars, hear the guards shouting inside Guajamal prison, remember the pain of hunger when he embarked on a hunger strike in protest, and relive the loneliness and abuse he endured in a punishment cell.

He entered prison at 23 and left at 27. He is now 28. He believes he still has enough life ahead of him to see a free Cuba.

“We are living in a postwar movie, as if bombs had fallen, as if a war had swept over Cuba,” he says. “But nothing is eternal, Cuba will change, it is inevitable, and there will be a day with a little more light.”

As he says this, he has already spent several hours without electricity.

A mother’s pain

“After five years I still ask myself the same question: how can a mother not be able to pull her child away from that harm? How can a mother not be able to save her child from such a great injustice?” says Yenisey Taboada, who could list everything the government has taken from her since her son, 26-year-old Duannis León Taboada, was arrested after joining the July 11 demonstration in the Diez de Octubre municipality of Havana.

“They have taken everything from us — important dates, close relatives have died and haven’t been able to see my son, or my son hasn’t been able to attend their funerals, like the day his great-uncles died, who watched him grow up,” she says. “We have lost Mother’s Days together; my mother suffered a heart scare from holding so much in. We haven’t been able to see Duanni form his own family. We’ve lost too much.”

Inside the prison, inmates live in a country as emaciated as the one outside. There is barely any electric lighting, and the prisoners are allowed to receive rechargeable lamps from relatives. Water is delivered once a day, and when it doesn’t arrive, each inmate is given two buckets instead.

Outside, Taboada’s situation is no better. A few days ago, on July 4, she made her last visit to her son at the Combinado del Este prison on Havana’s outskirts.

“I’ve had several visits where it’s been hard for me to find transportation,” she complains.

Little fuel has entered Cuba since the beginning of the year, when the Donald Trump administration imposed an oil embargo aimed at depriving the Havana government of external energy supplies. But that is not the only challenge she faces. She recently spent four consecutive days without electricity, a situation that has become commonplace across much of the country.

When she reflects on it, Taboada says it is not necessarily that Cuba was a better place before. Rather: “Cuba is no longer Cuba.” “Ever since July 11, I’ve lived with the constant feeling that my life was put on pause and that’s where we remain. Over the last five years, Cuba has deteriorated even further; we’re losing the country itself. I feel like we’re adrift, that nobody is governing us, that we’re alone, just trying to make it through another day alive.”

She recently witnessed something she says she had never seen before: “I saw people lifting manhole covers and pulling out water because we don’t even have water. It feels like my country is in the middle of an apocalypse. You see people like zombies staring at the ground. At night you hear children crying from the heat, and it gives you a sense of helplessness. Every day you hear pots banging; it is the Cuban’s cry for help.”

Since July 11, Cuba has never truly fallen silent again. People voice their frustrations through cacerolazos (pot-banging protests), constant denunciations on social media, and demonstrations that erupt across the country with little warning. The authorities’ response has intensified as well, because repression did not end with that mass protest. The Cuban Observatory for Human Rights reports at least 1,949 acts of repression during the first half of 2026, including approximately 257 arbitrary detentions. Meanwhile, the organization Prisoners Defenders has documented more than 175 people becoming new political prisoners during the same period, bringing the total number of political prisoners in Cuba to more than 1,000.

“From 2021 to 2026 the social and economic crisis has worsened and, to that extent, repression has also increased exponentially,” explains Cuban lawyer Raudiel Peña Barrios, a member of the legal advisory group Cubalex. “Even after July 11, we can see that there has been an increase in social protests — not as widespread as those at that time, but there have been other large-scale ones. This has led to increased repression, and the number of political prisoners has also grown since then.”

At every visit to the prison, Duanni asks his mother the same thing: “Mom, is there anything new? Anything about us? What are they saying about the country? What are they saying about the protesters?”

It is his way of asking people not to forget that many remain behind bars. In fact, most of the political prisoners detained after the July 11 protests are still in prison. Those who have been released, meanwhile, have not escaped official harassment.

“Those who have served sentences continue to suffer surveillance, threats, visits, summonses, detentions, persecution, obstacles to working,” says Javier Larrondo, director of Prisoners Defenders. “The regime sees them as enemies and prefers them outside the island.”

The path of exile

Not even exile, that other territory Cubans often find themselves inhabiting, has spared Sissi Abascal from sadness. “Today, five years after that July 11, that memory is not only nostalgia. It is a mix of sadness for those who are still in prison, anger at the reality the island continues to face, but, above all, immense pride.”

She arrived in Miami in May, after the Cuban government made her release from La Bellotex women’s prison in Matanzas conditional on her leaving the country. She had been imprisoned on charges of contempt, assault and public disorder for taking part in the protests in Jovellanos. Abascal, then 22 years old, had joined the demonstrations as the youngest member of the dissident group Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White).

After four and a half years in prison, her health deteriorated. She ultimately accepted permanent exile from Cuba, much as the government has compelled others to do by forcing them to choose between prison and banishment.

Last year, the same fate befell José Daniel Ferrer García, the prominent opposition leader from eastern Cuba who was arrested during the 2021 protests in Santiago de Cuba. Ferrer had long refused any arrangement that required him to leave the country. In the end, however, he relented.

“Faced with constant pressure from the political police for us to leave Cuba, I ended up accepting exile,” he wrote in a handwritten letter that was smuggled out of Mar Verde prison and later made public.

Attention has also turned to Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, the artist and leader of the San Isidro Movement, who captured the public imagination by turning art into protest and protest into art. On July 9, he completed his five-year prison sentence and was released from Guanajay prison, southeast of Havana. He has since gone into exile, a path taken by several prominent Cuban dissidents in recent years.

This is how the Cuban government has sought to close the deep fissure opened by July 11: by imprisoning dissidents or pushing into exile those it can no longer keep behind bars. But July 11, once an ordinary date, before history laid claim to it, has become etched into Cuba’s national consciousness.

“Feelings flood back when I remember that day,” Abascal says. “What remains first for me is the indelible memory of astonishment and hope. To see our people suddenly lose their fear, to flood the streets peacefully and shout for freedom. It made me feel the future was possible for the first time in many years.”

She continues: “But I also keep the memory of the pain and helplessness — the moment joy turned into tension because of repression, communication blackouts, arbitrary arrests and harsh sentences. July 11 symbolizes the struggle for justice and respect for human dignity. May this date keep the spark of courage alive.”

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