Today marks the 15th anniversary of Cuba’s Black Spring of 2003

On a spring morning 15 years ago in Cuba not much different than today’s morning, the apartheid Castro dictatorship launched an island-wide operation to violently crackdown on Cuban opposition leaders and independent journalists. By the end of the day, 75 innocent Cubans were arrested and given long prison sentences — as much as 25 years — for the counterrevolutionary act of exercising free speech. That day, March 18, 2003, was named and continues to be known as the Black Spring of 2003.

As we commemorate another anniversary of Cuba’s Black Spring, not much has changed in Cuba over the past 15 years. The Castro dictatorship remains as brutal and repressive as it was then and in many ways has become more brutal and repressive. Prisons continue to overflow with political prisoners where they are tortured and beaten on an almost daily basis. Over the past year, like the year before it, and the year before that, and so on and so on, human rights activists were arrested by the thousands and dozens of female opposition members were viciously attacked and even sexually violated by Castro State Security forces.

And most disturbing of all, the Castro dictatorship continues to brutalize, murder, and assassinate its opponents with impunity with nary a word of concern or protest from the international community.

The fifteenth anniversary of the Black Spring is yet another reminder that Cuba remains smothered under the same darkness that enveloped the island fifty-nine years ago.