By Vicente Morín Aguado
HAVANA TIMES – Thirty-four years have passed since that November of glory for freedom, when Berliners finally put aside their fear and tore down the wall. As usually happens in such cases, the trigger was an individual act, it can almost be said that a mistaken opinion about what was happening, however, expressed the feeling, the majority desire of the moment.
I tell you because in Cuba we also need, finally, to lose fear even if the wall is not seen in a specific place in Havana.
Just as we had on July 11 in 2021, in communist East Germany, there was a large demonstration, the press spoke of 50 thousand people, a month before the wall was demolished by hand, without firing a single shot.
This is what El País, from Spain, said on October 10, 1989:
“No less than 50,000 people gathered yesterday around the church of St. Nicholas in the East German city of Leipzig, in the largest concentration of political protest in the East German state since the tumultuous days of the anti-Stalinist revolt in 1953. Despite the crowds, the demonstration took place in absolute calm, and the police did not intervene, which demonstrates the disagreements within the GDR authorities about the need or not to apply harsh repression against dissidents.”
We know that in Cuba there have been no discrepancies on the part of the repressors, whose current result is 1,052 political prisoners, mostly young, documented case by case by Prisoners Defenders.org, without counting thousands of people repressed in the many other ways that the regime usually uses within the state system implemented by the late Fidel Castro.
Although the cited report on Germany does