One Cuban dead, dozens arrested after unprecedented protests
HAVANA, Cuba (AFP) — One person died and more than 100 others, including independent journalists and dissidents, have been arrested after unprecedented anti-government protests in Cuba, with some remaining in custody yesterday, observers and activists said.
A 36-year-old man named by the state news agency as Diubis Laurencio Tejeda died during an anti-government protest on the outskirts of Havana on Monday, the interior ministry said.
The ministry said it “mourns” his death while the news agency said he had taken part in “disturbances”.
Relatives and friends of those detained during and after Sunday’s historic demonstrations engaged in a desperate search yesterday for news on their whereabouts.
“They took him from the house handcuffed and beaten, without a shirt, without a mask,” said a 50-year-old woman who did not wish to give her name, enquiring about her 21-year-old son at a police station in the capital.
“They took many from the neighbourhood, young and old,” she said, before leaving empty-handed.
Cuba’s San Isidro free speech protest movement published late on Monday a list on Twitter of 144 people held or reported as disappeared after thousands of Cubans took to the streets in dozens of cities and towns in a spontaneous outburst of public anger.
Droves of demonstrators chanted “Down with the dictatorship” in protests dispersed by police in some 40 different locations Sunday.
About 100 protesters again gathered in Havana Monday evening, shouting “Down with communism”.
The rallies were unlike any seen since the Cuban revolution. They came as the country endures its worst economic crisis in 30 years, with chronic shortages of electricity, food and medicine and a recent worsening of the coronavirus pandemic.
But Cuba’s foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez denied yesterday there had been a “social outbreak” on Sunday, insisting that the people still support “the revolution and their government”.
Havana blamed the show of discontent on the United States pursuing a “policy of economic suffocation to provoke social unrest in the country”.
Cuba has been under US sanctions since 1962.
But Washington pointed the finger at “decades of repression” in the one-party communist state.