11J, Still
Five years later, Cuba remains between blackout, protest, prison, and expectation.
Today is July 11.
For many Cubans, inside and outside the island, this is not simply an anniversary belonging to the past. It is a date lived in expectation.
We check social media. We refresh. We return a few minutes later. We look to see whether people are in the streets again, whether pots can be heard from another neighborhood, whether a road has been blocked, whether a small fire has appeared in the darkness, whether someone has managed to upload a video before the connection disappears.
From Havana, messages reach me a deshora, extemporaneous, late and out of sequence:
Estoy bien, pero estamos incomunicados.
I am fine, but we cannot communicate.
The sentence contains one of the central contradictions of contemporary Cuba: survival alongside isolation, the insistence on speaking alongside the constant possibility of interruption.
This week, the national electrical system collapsed twice. Between one collapse and the next, residents in several Havana neighborhoods took to the streets, banging pots, honking horns, and demanding electricity. In May, hundreds had already protested in the capital, blocking roads with burning piles of garbage and shouting in the darkness. These protests do not have the magnitude of July 11, 2021. But neither are they separate from it.
The government has worked relentlessly to prevent the simultaneity and national visibility that made the original 11J possible. Protests are kept local, fragmented, difficult to document and easier to repress. But they continue. They have happened this year, this month, this week.
In the epilogue to the dissertation I defended in 2022, I wrote:
Las protestas continúan, aunque no siempre llegan a la Red. Internet en Cuba se va y regresa, siguiendo lo que todos sospechan es una de las maneras preferidas por las autoridades de controlar el flujo de información.
I wrote those words about the aftermath of July 2021. They remain, disturbingly, in the present tense.
11J happened, and then it remained.
It remained in the political imagination of the country. In the reflex of looking toward the street whenever the electricity disappears. In the government’s fear of crowds becoming visible to one another. In the families who continue waiting for prisoners to return home. Rights organizations estimate that hundreds of people connected to the July 2021 demonstrations remain imprisoned, some serving sentences of more than twenty years.
It remains, too, in the body and uncertain whereabouts of Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara.
Luis Manuel was arrested on July 11, 2021, before he could reach the protests. His five-year sentence should have ended on July 9. Instead, authorities removed him from Guanajay prison and transferred him to an undisclosed location. He remains in state custody, apparently awaiting permission to leave the country. He has completed the sentence that was unjust from the beginning, yet the state continues to decide where his body may exist and under what conditions he may be free.
A cacerolazo cannot repair an electrical grid. A burning pile of garbage cannot empty a prison. A spontaneous protest does not by itself produce a political program or resolve the crisis that brought people into the streets.
Protest is not the solution. It is the symptom.
But a symptom is not insignificant. It is the moment when private suffering becomes audible, shared, and therefore political. It reveals the rupture that official discourse tries to conceal. The sound of the pots does not tell us what comes next. It tells us that the present has become unbearable.
Perhaps that is why we continue looking at the networks today.
We are not waiting for history to repeat itself exactly. Historical events do not return on command or according to the calendar. We are looking because 11J demonstrated that scattered frustrations could recognize one another, that one neighborhood could see another, and that what appeared isolated could suddenly become collective.
The Cuban government knows this too.
That is why 11J is not over. It is being contained.