14ymedio, Havana, 15 October 2021 — Cuban officialdom continues with its defamation campaign against Yunior García Aguilera and 15N (November 15), which had initially been called for a nationwide demonstration on November 20, which it was decided to advance to the 15th after the Government announced the National Defense Day for that date.
“The baseness is such that they have cut off our Internet services so that we cannot even defend ourselves within our networks,” said the playwright and member of the Archipiélago group. Although he says that “Cuban ingenuity also knows how to circumvent these internal blockades.”
The activist made clear in a post on his in a post on his Facebook profile: “If there were justice and we had 15 minutes on national television, the entire lie that the power structure has fabricated would collapse instantly.”
He also requested “with respect that the lynching against any Cuban who honestly defends his principles, regardless of political color, ceases. When we say ‘with everyone and for the good of everyone’, we mean it.”
García, one of the promoters of 15N, recalled that his “generation grew up hearing the phrase: ‘for your own good, speak softly’,” and that some of his friends have left the island or “dream of doing so soon.”
He explains that he does not want his phone to be recharged or to be sent a pair of shoes, he wants “Cuba to be the nation to which everyone can return whenever they want, think how they think, and from which no one else wants to leave.”
He regretted that in 2022 Cuba “will mark 70 years without democracy” and that the revolutionary promises on “rights, justice, freedom and free elections” turned into a Soviet appendage. And what “promised to be as green as the palms” was “wrapped in a red cloak with a hammer and sickle guarding the lone star.”
The playwright also made reference to the fact that “single thought, censorship and political persecution have been the daily bread of any Cuban who does not submit to the control of the bosses. And the end of the Cold War only increased our misery. We are survivors of an unfinished war, in which we were neither victors nor defeated, only hostages of an obsolete dogma, of a clan of officials clinging to power and its privileges, of a whim propped up with Russian-made rifles.”
On November 15, García said, “we will march without hatred” for “a right that has never been respected in 62 years of dictatorship, but we are going to conquer it with civility. The whole world will be looking towards Cuba that day.”
Hoping that no more generations go by without being able to “freely choose their ideology, their party and their president,” as happened with their parents, who have had to “resign themselves to the decision of others” and ratify them “to avoid looking for problems.”
For the Archipiélago member, “it is past time to say what we think out loud.” Although he knows that “power plays dirty, that it gives combat orders against its own people, that it lies to our faces, that it would even be capable of infiltrating its paramilitaries into the march to generate violence and blame us. Each citizen must be responsible for their own conduct and uphold the peaceful and firm attitude that we have called for.”
There is no doubt for Yunior that “November 15 can and should be a beautiful day. Wherever a Cuban lives, we know that his heart will be in Cuba.” And he is confident that “the powerful will not insist on behaving in a cowardly way against their own citizens. Do not repeat the crime of July 11. Hopefully officers and soldiers understand that there is no honor in obeying immoral orders.”
To those who continue to use his work with cultural institutions as “blackmail”, Yunior García reminded them that “working is a right, not a privilege” and that he has “given as much as or more than what I have received.”
He thanked his teachers for the education they gave him, but he let the government know that he had already paid for all his studies. “Know it. I went to all the schools in the countryside, cut sugarcane, harvested potatoes in Artemisa and coffee in Pinares de Mayarí. I completed two years of social service receiving the illusion of a salary.”
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