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On the fifth anniversary of the protests of July 11, 2021, former Cuban spy Gerardo Hernández Nordelo posted on his Facebook profile an iconic photograph from those demonstrations to mock the media that covered the popular uprising, revealing that the woman in the image with her fist raised is his own sister, a member of the Communist Party of Cuba.
In his Facebook post, Hernández explained that the photo, taken by photographer Ismael Francisco, “traveled the world that July 11” and was used by what he calls “(dis)information media” as a representative image of the protests against the regime.
"Accustomed to lying about what happens on the island, they could not resist and turned my sister Mai-Lin Alberty, now Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba in El Cerro, into an 'opponent,' who is - as the haters would say - 'a true communist!'" wrote Hernández, accompanying the text with the hashtags #CDRCuba, #CubaNoSeRinde, and #TumbaElBloqueo.
However, international media covered and referred to the pro-government protests that the regime organized in response to the social outbreak, which means that the argument of the former spy, as usual, manipulates and skews the true significance of July 11th.
The publication aims to discredit the independent media that covered the events of July 11, but what it really illustrates is the confusion that prevailed that day in the streets of Cuba.
Thousands of citizens, from the most diverse backgrounds, took to the streets to protest against the regime in the largest demonstrations recorded on the island in decades. The regime responded with paramilitary forces and mobilized its officials, as was the case with Hernández's sister.
Hernández, who has been the National Coordinator of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution since his release in 2014, has been a constant figure in the public defense of the regime and in the attack against those who documented the events of July 11th. He was sentenced in the United States to two life terms for his role in the shooting down of the Brothers to the Rescue planes in 1996, which resulted in the deaths of four people, and was released as part of the normalization agreement between Cuba and the United States negotiated by Obama and Raúl Castro.
After the 11J, Hernández justified the repression with the phrase "the streets have limits," referring to the brutal response of the regime against the demonstrators.
On that July 11, 2021, thousands of Cubans took to the streets in dozens of municipalities demanding freedom, an end to blackouts, and access to food and medicine. The regime's response was massive repression: over a thousand people were detained and hundreds were sentenced in summary trials to prison terms of up to 25 years. The organization Justicia11J documented 775 political prisoners, 338 of whom were directly sentenced for participating in the protests.
This Saturday, while Hernández was trying to turn a family anecdote into a propaganda argument, relatives of political prisoners and activists commemorate the fifth anniversary of 11J by demanding the freedom of those who are still paying with years of imprisonment for having taken to the streets that day.
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