Yurisleidis Remedios, a Cuban mother living in the Altamira neighborhood of Santiago de Cuba, posted a video on Facebook in which she angrily and tearfully denounces the police repression that she and her children experienced during a street protest demanding electricity, food, and freedom.
"Yesterday was a day when I didn't scream; my heart screamed," Remedios says at the beginning of the video, recorded the day after the demonstration.
"I thought I was the only one who had taken my children out to the street, but nearly all the kids were there, along with mothers, elderly people, everyone. We broke the ice, we went out into the streets," she emphasizes.
According to Remedios, the regime's response was swift: "The repressors arrived, the thugs came in three patrols. In each patrol there were five police officers who got out running with batons in their hands. They looked like demons coming down on us, the mothers of the children."
Thanks to neighbors intervening, the women were not directly assaulted. However, their children were hurt while running in fear. At the end of the video, Remedios shows her daughter Analía with visible bruises and injuries on her body, due to a fall caused by the panic resulting from the police presence.
"Did you see what happened to my girl? The fear when they saw all those enforcers who arrived with batons to chase after us, hitting us. Look at how the girl got all bruised," she says, her voice breaking.
Remedios also describes the terror her children experienced during the march: "Mom, if the police come, we're going to put our hands here. Mom, if they take us, how do we grab you?" They were, in her words, "clinging to her dress in fear."
Beyond denouncing repression, Remedios articulates a direct political discourse against the regime. "We have a president who has abandoned us, who has turned his back on us, who is not facing us," she states.
Regarding Díaz-Canel, it is even more striking: "That coconut is empty, that man says what he is told to say, that man is an artificial intelligence, they program him, and that's what he says."
The brave woman blames Fidel and Raúl Castro for being the architects of the current misery and the division of Cuban families, and concludes that only a change of system can move the country forward.
"We all know it is a failed state. There are still people who think that Cuba will improve if the Castro regime remains at the helm of our country. Neither a crab nor anyone else will improve Cuba," he emphasizes.
Remedios also denounces the rationing of gas, which the government intends to distribute only to "sick children and large families." Her argument is compelling: "Díaz-Canel, you have made all the children sick. So don't say that only sick children have the right to gas. Because if it's about sick children, then all Cuban children have the right to cook with gas."
The protest in which they participated is part of a wave of demonstrations shaking Santiago de Cuba since at least May, intensified in June by an unprecedented electricity crisis leaving thousands of families without power for more than 24 consecutive hours.
This is not the first time this mother has openly challenged the regime. On May 28, Remedios was summoned by the Police as retaliation for her public criticisms of Díaz-Canel, and she tore up the summons as a sign of protest, broadcasting the act on Facebook.
The analyst Rolando Cartaya recorded 1,311 protests throughout Cuba just in May, and the repression has followed a documented pattern.
In June, a court in Palma Soriano requested up to ten years in prison for three women who protested against blackouts in November 2024, highlighting the systematic criminalization of any form of dissent.
Filed under: