About 30 people, many of whom waved Cuban flags and carried signs with proclamations of freedom, gathered near Buckingham Fountain on Sunday to peacefully demonstrate in solidarity with recent protests in Cuba.
“If Cuba is in the streets, Chicago too,” the group yelled as drivers honked their horns in support. “Joe Biden, Cuba needs your help,” the group chanted.
Some began the day at a Mass, spoken in Spanish, at St. Ita Catholic Church in the Lakewood-Balmoral neighborhood.
“It was really nice for the church to really do a blessing for the protest,” said Handry Martinez, who lived in Cuba until he was 19. “It was more trying to find, I guess, the strength and pray for the people of Cuba ... for the situation to change.”
The purpose of the protest was to support people living in Cuba, he said.
“It really is about freedom; it is about people getting tired of living in misery and poverty,” Martinez said. “There is no food, there is no medicine ... they don’t want more communism. They want the dictatorship to be over. That truly is the nature of the fight.”
People at the protest held up their hands to form an “L” with their fingers, which stands for libertad, or freedom, said participant Hillary Bruzon. The protests in Cuba have died down a bit since they started last week, Bruzon said, but in that time people have been incarcerated, gone missing, been tortured and been killed by the government.
“At the end of the day, there’s no other solution than to overturn the government; the government has to go,” she said.
The government has put “military forces” into the streets, broken into people’s homes and separated families, according to Bruzon. “It’s happening all over the country, it’s everywhere,” she said.
“There are people that I know that are missing, my cousins, friends from where my parents are from,” Bruzon said.
Bruzon has been to Cuba four times. People there fear listening to certain music or saying things too loudly, she said, out of fear of retaliation. Cuban people lack basic necessities, which has only been exacerbated by the pandemic.
“People are starving, people are committing suicide,” she said. “It’s really a dark time in Cuba right now.”
Bruzon would like to see the United States help restore internet access to the Cuban people, as it would give people a chance to “reorganize and restrategize.” She would also like to see the United Nations investigate reports of missing people.
Lifting the embargo the United States has on Cuba is not going to stop the problem, Martinez said. He identifies as a Democrat but is disappointed in the way his party has handled the situation.
President Joe Biden is moving too slow, he said. He is dismayed by the fact that former President Barack Obama has not released a statement given the fact that his administration made it a goal to improve relationships with Cuba.
“The fact that we go miles and miles away from home and help other countries achieve their freedom, and within 90 miles of our shores there is probably the biggest dictatorship in history in Latin America or in the Americas at all, and we don’t do anything about it,” he said. “Communism is a cancer ... it needs to be completely erased.”
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