Five years after the historic protests of July 11, 2021, unpublished images from that day have surfaced, documenting both the popular outcry in the streets of Havana and the violent repressive machinery that the regime deployed to crush it.
The videos, published on Instagram by activist Marcos Louit, show scenes from key locations in the Cuban capital, including the intersection of Belascoaín and Carlos III, where thousands of people shouted "Homeland and Life, freedom, freedom!" and raised their hands in a sign of peaceful protest whenever they spotted troops.
The images also capture the desperate message that those Cubans were trying to convey to the world: "We are dying; we have no medicines; we have no food; the government does not represent us: Homeland and Life!"
But alongside that hope, the videos reveal the other side of that day: the repression organized and carried out with complete impunity.
Everything began when Miguel Díaz-Canel appeared on national television to pronounce the phrase that would become a symbol of the regime's brutality: "The order to combat is given, revolutionaries to the streets."
This call activated the so-called rapid response groups, mostly made up of civilians dressed as military personnel armed with wooden clubs, who arrived by the dozens on buses to the gathering points.
According to the author of the videos, "although they presented themselves as the people, they were actually nothing more than individuals mobilized by the government, who were given wooden clubs with orders to do whatever was necessary against the protesters."
The tactic was methodical: infiltrated agents among the crowd identified those who spoke out and arrested them on the spot to instill panic and force dispersal.
"As soon as someone issues a warning, shouts, or starts to stir up a protest, they are immediately taken captive.", notes the description of one of the videos.
Once the arrests were made, the repressive groups remained on the scene celebrating their "victory," brandishing their weapons and chanting slogans, including "Fidel! Fidel!", in an act of absolute impunity towards those who had just been crushed.
Regular military troops, according to their own records, supported the operation from a distance without needing to intervene directly in that initial phase.
The regime also ordered a widespread internet blackout to prevent images from reaching the outside, making the emergence of this material five years later even more significant.
The protests of July 11th were the largest public demonstrations in Cuba in over six decades, with Havana as the epicenter of 82 of the gatherings recorded across the country.
At least one protester, Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, was shot and killed in La Güinera the following day, and more than 1,400 people were arrested in the days that followed.
Five years later, the wound remains open. At least 338 people are still imprisoned for offenses directly related to those protests, and Cuba has reached a historic record of between 1,260 and 1,281 political prisoners, according to Prisoners Defenders.
The pardon announced in April 2026 for more than 2,000 inmates explicitly excluded those convicted of "crimes against authority," the category that the regime used to criminalize the protesters from July 11th.
The most emblematic case on this anniversary is that of Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, leader of the San Isidro Movement, whose five-year sentence officially expired on July 9, but remains missing after being removed from the Guanajay prison by State Security on July 7 without informing his family, in what Amnesty International has described as enforced disappearance.
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