With flags and posters of Fidel Castro and chanting “Cuba lives and works”, the population of the Caribbean island took to the streets of the country to celebrate Labor Day this Sunday (1st), in the first celebration of its kind since the beginning of the Covid pandemic. -19.
Participants were summoned by the government, which provided buses to take them to the Plaza de Revolución in Havana. There, regime leader Miguel DÃaz-Canel and his predecessor Raúl Castro, both wearing white masks, accompanied the parade.
Health workers opened the event in the capital, carrying flags, banners and giant paper bottles that simulated the Soberana and Abdala vaccines, developed by Cuban scientists against Covid-19.
“Cuba does not stop”, despite a “complex and challenging” international context in which “hostility is growing and the US embargo intensifies”, said the secretary general of the Confederation of Cuban Workers, Ulises Guilarte, the only speaker of the parade.
The marches, held annually across the country before the coronavirus forced the cancellation of commemorations in 2020 and 2021, celebrate the Cuban Revolution but also express the communist-led rebuke of the embargo imposed by the United States since the Cold War.
Juana Garcia, who works at the Cuban Institute of Philosophy, said the demonstration exceeded her expectations and is a demonstration of solidarity for the cause. “Despite so many difficulties, the majority of Cubans support the revolutionary process,” she said, carrying a small Cuban flag. “We Cubans work to solve our own problems. We don’t need interference.”
There is still no official estimate of the number of participants in the early morning marches. Miami-based NGO Cubalex said this week that independent journalists and activists were warned not to leave their homes on Sunday.
“We denounced the harassment of several Cuban activists and journalists in recent days. State security threatened them not to take to the streets on May 1. This is how the island lives on Labor Day, preceded by days of repression,” the organization wrote in Twitter.
This Sunday also marked the first time that Cubans took to the streets since the July 11 anti-government protests — the biggest after the revolution led by Fidel in 1959 — shook the country, in a test of the first non-Cuban leader. Castro family.
Of the 1,395 detained after the acts, 728 are still in prison, according to Cubalex. In November, opponents of the regime tried to repeat the protests, but they were harshly repressed.
Cuba, a Caribbean island of 11 million inhabitants, is going through a severe economic crisis, which has led to shortages of food and medicine. The Cuban regime blames the US embargo for the crisis, while the US blames the communist leadership for the mismanagement of the economy.
The difficulties experienced by the population also provoked a mass exodus to the United States. More than 80,000 Cubans have left the island in recent months for their northern neighbor, according to data from the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) service, following two main routes: by plane to Nicaragua and then by plane. land, towards the border with Mexico, or by boat through the Straits of Florida.
