From Notes from the World
The Democratic Socialists of America Travel to Cuba and Happily Meet With the Island’s Jailers
On 25 November – the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women – Amnesty International released a report focusing on Cuba that included the following:
Women human rights defenders, activists, and journalists suffer human rights violations such as arbitrary detentions, illegal interrogations, undue surveillance, unjust criminalization, and due process violations, with patterns differentiated by their gender….The repression exercised against women by state agents constitutes a form of institutional gender-based violence. Women suffer specific forms of repression, such as the use of male agents in operations to intimidate them; forced nudity and invasive body searches during arrests; stigmatization by attacking aspects of their gender and physical appearance; and discrimination based on age and sexual orientation…Defamation campaigns with direct references to their sex lives, physical appearance, and romantic relationships, “acts of repudiation” using misogynistic language, and the public exposure of personal data constitute forms of symbolic and psychological violence that seek to stigmatize and delegitimize women for their activism.
Such information about the reactionary nature of the dictatorship that has ruled Cuba since 1959 – and which, for all its radical rhetoric and ideological trappings, has now curdled into little more than clusters of Communist Party and military elites guarding their hotels from an ever-more disenfranchised populace – would come as little surprise to those who have observed the island in recent years. According to the Madrid-based human rights organization Prisoners Defenders, there are now nearly 1,200 political prisoners in Cuba, and the island’s landscape as 2025 draws to a close is one of material deprivation and draconian state repression that perhaps can only be paralleled by the regimes in Nicaragua and Venezuela in the hemisphere. After the Cuban government – or what masquerades as it – engaged in mass arrests following large-scale 2021 demonstrations, Human Rights Watch detailed how it had “systematically engaged in arbitrary detention, ill-treatment of detainees, and abuse-ridden criminal prosecutions in response to overwhelmingly peaceful anti-government protests.”
Those detained by the government, currently ostensibly led by President Miguel Díaz-Canel but over which the families of former rulers Fidel and Raúl Castro still exercise significant control, include some of the island’s leading lights of music, art, literature and journalism, along with feminists, LGBTQ activists and hundreds of ordinary citizens. The rapper Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo Pérez, designated a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, is currently serving nine years in prison for “contempt” and “public disorder,” but his real crime was to dare to stand up to the regime’s abuses and hypocrisy in his music, most notably as part of the collective behind the 2021 song “Patria y Vida.” The performance artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara – who grew up in Cerro, one of Havana’s poorest neighborhoods and in 2020 observed to me that “the Cuban regime is weighted on the basis of white men, macho, patriarchal white men” – is jailed under the same “contempt” and “public disorder” charges as Castillo Pérez and has also begin designated a prisoner of conscience. Convicted of “public disorder,” “contempt” and “resistance,” the poet and activist María Cristina Garrido Rodríguez also remains in jail. The Youtuber Sulmira Martínez Pérez, better known as “Salem,” was thrown in jail for “contempt” and “crimes against the constitutional order” for calling for nonviolent protests against the government. Last year, PEN International issued an alert about how “for six decades, the Cuban authorities have systematically sought new ways to suppress any and all dissent, particularly targeting freedom of expression…In recent years, the repression has ramped up to keep up with the growth of internet and social media platforms that serve as outlets for creatives in Cuba.” This past September, the organization described how “Cuban writers and artists continue to face relentless persecution for their books, articles, and protests. The government’s systematic efforts to silence them reveal the profound fear of free expression that lies at the heart of repression in Cuba.”
Michael Deibert is a journalist and author.
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