and walk the streets to instill fear
HAVANA TIMES – Dozens of neighbors went out to the road on Wednesday night within the Humberto Álvarez neighborhood in Matanzas. “There have been quite a lot of people, and the police couldn’t do anything,” stated a resident of the settlement near the old Dos Rosas sugar mill, between Santa Marta and Varadero, where lots of the residents are migrants from the eastern a part of the country and a number of other makeshift neighborhoods.
“The place is kind of violent, so it just isn’t easy,” said the identical source.
In videos shared on social media, it is feasible to listen to, amid the tumult, the sound of banging on pots and screams of: “join us.” Right now, that area doesn’t have web access.
Meanwhile, in Nuevitas (Camagüey), the regime has managed to quiet, with repression and for the moment, last week’s mass protests, crucial in Cuba since July 11, 2021.
“Here, persons are very scared because many individuals have been arrested who didn’t even exit to protest that day, simply for being on their porch filming those that passed,” says one in every of the residents from the Pastelillo neighborhood, one in every of those who spilled into the streets last Friday.
The young lady didn’t even want to provide 14ymedio her name, “My mother is scared and doesn’t want me to inform anyone what is going on, so I won’t be the subsequent one they take.”
On her block, she says, “they’ve taken two, one in every of them a child who keeps to himself and has a young daughter.” His wife, she says, “is desperate because she has no news about where he’s being held, though rumor has it they’re being transferred to town of Camagüey.”
“There are a bunch of people that usually are not from here patrolling the streets, some wearing civilian clothes and in addition the little roosters, who dress all in black,” she says, referring to the Black Wasps or Black Berets [Special Forces]. “There’s quite a lot of discomfort about that because you’ll be able to tell they walk down the road to instill fear.”
Moreover, she adds, “Two nights ago they shut off the ability and played loud music on the Bar La Patana. People were pissed off at that because all the neighborhood was dark and so they were having fun there and frightening individuals with their songs. I’ve seen many older people put up with what they’re doing to us. Even one in every of my neighbors who until last week was a badass has retreated because one in every of her nephews is amongst those detained and so they beat him, forcefully taking him from his house.” The neighbor told her that they didn’t give her nephew any option but to protest, “because all he’s ever had in his life is misery.”
The web signal, which that they had cut off in Nuevitas for greater than three days, is returning little by little, however the police are heavily guarding the stores that sell in MLC, the dollarized magnetic currency.
Justicia 11J confirms this scene in a press release shared on Wednesday, “The park in Nuevitas is totally militarized. They’ve informed us that they’ll observe about 8 policemen on motorcycles, 6 patrol cars, 3 black beret cars and innumerable policemen.”
In the meanwhile, the organization, which maintains a register of about fifty arrests in all of Cuba since mid-June when the cacerolazos (pot banging) began in response to the scheduled blackouts, denounced that the variety of arrests in Nuevitas exceeds 18.
Amongst them, the 11-year-old girls who were beaten by police the night of August nineteenth. “This morning, Ivón Freijoo and Daimarelis Echeverría, together with their daughters, Beatriz Aracelia Rodríguez Freijoo and Gerlin Torrente Echevarría, respectively, were taken to an interrogation,” stated the organization in a post on Facebook, reiterating the denunciation made by the Cuban Observatory for Human Rights.
The organization revealed that Beatriz’s father and Ivón Freijoo’s husband, Frank Carly Rodríguez Ultra, arrived in the US and that presently, “is being held in custody by the Border Patrol.” For that reason, they warned of the “danger that a return to Cuban represents for this father and his family,” and asked US immigration authorities to “assess his political asylum claim based on credible fear.”
Related to that, the young neighbor who spoke to 14ymedio assured, “I do know there are individuals who participated within the march who jumped on a raft over the weekend. There have been about ten young individuals who knew that in the event that they were caught they’d find yourself jailed.”
Translated by: Silvia Suárez for Translating Cuba
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