14ymedio’s Faces of 2020: The Independent Artists of Cuba’s San Isidro Movement

The regime did not calculate the silent support that the San Isidro Movement has among young people and did not believe in the ability to convene and organize social networks. (MSI)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Havana, 24 December 2020 – The San Isidro Movement, born just two years ago, has shaken the political situation in Cuba in the last weeks of 2020 by crossing borders and putting the regime in a bind of incalculable dimensions.

At the end of 2018, a group of independent artists who rejected Decree 349 – a law through which the Government sought to regulate the arts sector by making cultural work outside the state orbit de facto impossible – formed this movement in the Havana neighborhood that gave the movement its name.

The collective took center stage with a protest held in November to demand the release of one of its members, Denis Solís, sentenced to eight months in prison for the alleged crime of contempt. Several members of the group began a hunger and thirst strike, which some were able to maintain for more than a week until the headquarters of the Movement, where they were gathered, was raided by the political police, who detained them for several hours.

In solidarity with them, in addition to that they have found outside of Cuba, a group of at least 200 people demonstrated in Havana in an unusual protest that managed to begin a failed dialogue with the cultural authorities. The harassment of the Movement continues, with arrests, acts of repudiation and accusations of terrorism, but they have lit the fuse of a dream to open a new horizon for the opposition in 2021.

See more 14ymedio’s series Faces of 2020

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