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The Cuban Institute of the Book chose this Saturday, the fifth anniversary of the protests on July 11, 2021, to present the poetry collection “Migrations,” by poet Luis Lorente, a coincidence of title and date that draws significant attention.
The presentation took place as part of the "Saturday of the Book," a weekly cultural space that the ICL regularly organizes on Madera Street in the historic center of Havana, without any explicit political connotation.
The panel included writers Arturo Arango and Israel Domínguez and was led by Yanelis González, the director of Editorial Letras Cubanas, along with the author of the poetry collection. Also present were the president of the ICL, Juan Rodríguez Cabrera, national editing award winners Norberto Codina and Alex Pausides, and writers Charo Guerra and Leyla Leiva.
ICL itself described the event as "a cloudy morning in the humid Plaza de Armas of Havana's historic center where poetry brought the clarity of the absent sun." Luis Lorente (Cárdenas, 1948) is regarded as a central figure in contemporary Cuban poetry, having won the David Poetry Award in 1975 and the Casa de las Américas Award in 2004 and 2021.
The poetry collection contains approximately one hundred poems across nearly 300 pages and was published by Editorial Letras Cubanas, a publishing house founded in 1977 that will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary on January 1, 2027. In March, as reported by the state-run Granma, the director of Letras Cubanas described the work as "the novel of Luis's life through poetry."
What made the event a topic of conversation on social media was the symbolic weight of the date: July 11, 2021, marked the largest wave of anti-government protests in Cuba since 1959, when thousands of citizens took to the streets in over 80 locations demanding freedom with shouts of "Homeland and Life!" and "Down with the dictatorship!".
The repression was brutal: a protester, Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, was shot and killed in La Güinera, and dozens suffered injuries at the hands of the regime's repressive forces; more than 1,400 people were detained, and hundreds received prison sentences.
Five years after those events, 338 people remain imprisoned for causes related to 11J, and Cuba reports more than 1,260 political prisoners according to the organization Prisoners Defenders.
The title "Migraciones" resonates particularly strongly in this context: since 2021, more than a million Cubans have left the island in the largest exodus in its history, reducing the effective population from 11.3 million to between 8.6 and 8.8 million inhabitants, according to estimates from independent research.
In 2025, Cubans surpassed Venezuelans for the first time in asylum requests in Brazil, with nearly 42,000 applications, highlighting the scale of human displacement that the events of July 11 contributed to triggering.
In such a context, it is ironic that a Cuban state institution presented a book titled precisely "Migraciones" on the day that commemorates the protests which, to a large extent, accelerated that unprecedented exodus, leaving unclear whether the coincidence was intentional or merely a result of the usual "Saturday of the Book" calendar.
This Saturday, while the ICL was celebrating the literary event in Old Havana, the organization Cuban Freedom March called for a march in Miami under the slogan "Actions, not words" to commemorate the fifth anniversary of 11J and to envision a Cuba that, in a hopefully not distant future, does not experience the urgency of "migrations."
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