With only 10% battery on her phone and after 72 consecutive hours without electricity, independent journalist and activist Yania Suárez published a video on Facebook this Wednesday announcing that she has placed a Cuban flag on the balcony of her home in Havana, which will remain there on Saturday, July 11, and Sunday, July 12, marking the fifth anniversary of the 11J protests of 2021.
"It was the day when Cubans briefly felt like owners of Cuba," Suárez wrote at the bottom of the post, in which he suggests that these dates should be recognized as national holidays without any political decree mandating it.
Obtaining the flag was not easy. Suárez recounts that it took him "a fair amount of work and quite a bit of money" because the national symbol is nearly impossible to find in the Cuban capital.
In light of that scarcity, he called out to those who cannot buy it: "If I couldn't get it, I was going to make it with scraps of fabric like the mambises did. I invite Cubans who want to have one to make it this way with great dignity, because it is the repository of the best of us."
In the video, Suárez reflects on the meaning of the national flag and rejects the notion that the regime has appropriated it as an exclusive symbol.
"We may think that it is a symbol that has been usurped by the official discourse, and people may associate it with all the lies we have been told, but I honestly felt that the flag is a symbol of what Cubans have wanted for the good of Cuba," he asserts.
For Suárez, the flag transcends any ideology: it was born with an annexationist vocation, later passed into the hands of independence, and must continue to be an open symbol.
"The flag must be the symbolic bearer of our best wishes, whether we are wrong or not. We have that right; we don’t all have to think the same, it is ours," she argues.
Yania Suárez has a documented history of repression. She was arrested after participating in a call by the artivist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and was placed under house arrest by State Security.
In February 2022, she was arrested along with fellow journalist Yunia Figueredo.
Suárez closed his post with a slogan that captures the spirit of the gesture: "Long live Free Cuba."
The gesture occurs during a moment of high social tension. Cubans took to the streets to protest in Jaimanitas, a neighborhood in Havana, on July 5 and 7, with shouts of "Down with the dictatorship!", triggered by blackouts lasting up to 40 hours and food shortages.
The fifth anniversary of the 11J arrives with at least 338 people who are still serving sentences directly related to the protests of 2021, according to data from July 2026.
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