From our Bureau of Socialist Tolerance, Compassion, and Social Justice
A few days ago, a group of women and their children staged a very noisy protest in Favela, a small hamlet in eastern Cuban.
Normally, such an event in any remote location would go unnoticed. But a video of their anguished and angry pleas for food and water went viral on social media. And, as usual, Castro, Inc. has responded with threats and intimidation, and has begun to look for a “leader” or “leaders” who can be punished.
How dare these women complain? Who needs food and water in a tropical socialist paradise? Just breathe. The air is free and equally distributed among all Cubans. Breathe. Breathe deep, and stop yelling.
Loosely translated from CubaNet
Yadiuska went out on Sunday to protest with her mother, Yanuris, and her children because she couldn’t take it anymore. Neither they, nor the other mothers who were screaming for help, as seen in the videos, had it planned. There was no “leader” that the police are looking for, so that someone would pay for the daring.
They just exploded. Because, as if it were not enough to live between blackouts and with little food, they also took away their water. The day they set out on the dirt road that leads to their community, they had completed a month and a half without access to the essential liquid. They had survived by sharing the cisterns among all, the people who had the possibility. But that one is over too. And suddenly the 89 houses in the town were dry. That’s why they moved their plastic tanks and blocked the road. They had been empty for days and they no longer had much to lose.
Yadiuska Domínguez lives in the Adriano Galano Cautín community, known as La Favela, in the Guantanamo municipality of Maisí. It is literally the end of Cuba, if you look at the map from west to east.
If poverty in the rest of Cuba is suffocating, in the Favela it feels even starker. The products in the basic basket are not delivered periodically, not even bread, oil or beans. The community lives off harvesting coffee and the little they plant. Getting in and out of there is an odyssey. The transport does not reach the tip of the caiman.
In these three days that have passed since the protest, the young mother has been summoned and questioned several times by the local police. The authorities of the municipality of Maisí have threatened to arrest her and take away custody of her three children (nine, eight and six years old).
“My voice is the one that appears in the videos. She was so desperate, with so much anger, that she didn’t stop screaming until I was hoarse,” says the Guantanamo woman.
“They told me that if I uploaded more videos of the protest, they would publish things about me. They stressed to me that she was committing a crime and could go to prison. In addition, they were watching me to see if I did something, put me in jail, and that my children would go to Casa de la Patria (a foster home).
Well, favela is the Brazilian term for a slum or shanty town, so the first thing these savages need to do is some very basic math. Slums aren’t supposed to be nice and well-supplied. I mean, the nerve.