From the Streets to the Passport

By Mabel Toledo Cuéllar

From Houston we receive this personal chronicle, intimate and politically charged, of a young Cuban exile who decided to change the Patria o Muerte of the revolution of his native island for Patria y Vida in exile. All with Covid-19 as a catalyst of that decision

July 11, 2021, was a day that changed the minds of many Cubans on the Island, including mine. That morning was one of many spent immersed in the Covid-19 quarantine. I spent the day with my whole family at home; we had no idea what was happening outside. It was an obstinately hot summer day. From my room on the upper floor, I enjoyed my few hours of electricity, clinging to a pedestal fan; the heat hugged me beneath the metal roof, and through the window, the smell of boiling broth my mother was cooking —to stretch the meat our family in the United States sent us— drifted in. They called us, probably around noon, to tell us that “Cuba was in the streets,” that there were demonstrations everywhere; we only knew that, for four hours already, we had lost internet access. My skin bristled in a desperate cry of excitement; honestly, I thought the process of the end had begun —I genuinely believed that that year we would bring down the dictatorship. We had waited so long for that day, yet the results and reality left us speechless. From then on, we never again believed that Cuba could be free, and those of us who still had faith and the will to fight understood that, if anything, the battle had to be waged from abroad.

However, my understanding of Cuba’s reality began to change long before, when I was a child. Even though my life seemed far from politics at first or was scarce, I have very concrete images and memories of my homeland. My grandfather was the director of the rayon-nitro factory: a communist peasant who left the countryside to study Chemical Engineering in Havana and devoted his life to Fidel’s ideals. My grandmother was always Catholic, in an era when religion was as persecuted as music and homosexuality. My uncles left the country when I was very young; their annual visits and full suitcases kept the house furnished and with appliances, because my mother’s engineering degree, her master’s, and her position as co-director at the Electric Company did not suffice to buy a television. As a child, I did not think about politics: I had family abroad, toys, food, and my father worked in Varadero, the famous beach town. I changed schools when we moved to the little house near the factory. There, I saw another reality: children with adult responsibilities, poverty everywhere. That made me feel guilty and angry. I stopped believing the school speeches, and my father began to tell me about Martí and the true heroes of the homeland. Since I wore the uniform with the red scarf, I had heard that the government would fall one day. These experiences were the first cracks in the image of equality that Cuba tried to show the world and shaped my vision of the country. That slow awakening prepared me for the day when everything would explode: July 11, 2021.

That day, the rage accumulated over the years finally exploded in the streets. That year, the blackouts lasted eight hours a day; we cooked with charcoal, and medicines could only be found on the black market. But the unthinkable happened: people took to the streets, overturned police cars, faced the army unarmed, and marched. On the highways, you could hear shouts of “Patria y Vida” (a song that answered the official slogan: Patria o Muerte), “We are hungry!”, “Turn the lights on!”. Mothers with babies in their arms blocked the highways to Havana. My father went out to protest. The government cut the internet so we could not communicate, and our families abroad followed the news with a knot in their throats. We wanted the dictatorship to fall. But it didn’t. Police and army beat even twelve-year-old children; the red berets brought out tanks against people armed only with machetes, bicycles, and dogs. Most of the protesters were jailed or disappeared. The marches were broken by force, and afterwards, on television, the movement was criminalized, and new repressive laws were passed. It was not just another protest day but the most incredible display of courage I had seen in my life, and it showed me the price of speaking out. That day changed Cuba’s streets and my way of seeing the future. I had grown up hoping that, when it came, it would be an unstoppable wave that would end up freeing the Island. I was not brave; my veins burned to go out and shout at the president, but I listened to my mother, saw her fear, and kept praying for the change others might achieve while hiding within the safety of those old walls that made up my home.

The events of July 11 marked the end of my hope for change from within the Island. That day reminded us that we were alive and, at the same time, killed us forever. The illusion that, if we united and took to the streets one day, they would have to leave was over. Once we were brave, we lost the little we had left—the streets filled with a mourning silence, a mute pain. I was reborn that day. July 11 forged in me a new Cuban identity that had never felt so close to the land that saw me born, nor to its injustices. Before that date, I already knew the history of my homeland, I memorized the names of the great heroes; I could tell the “true men” apart from those other worms who fed on my Island while pretending to defend it. I knew my family lived divided because of communism, that my sister worked as a shop assistant to support our mother (a master’s in Business Administration), her grandparents, and siblings. I knew stories about the Mariel exodus, the persecution of artists, dissidents, and homosexuals; I had also heard strange stories about surviving the Special Period. But I had never seen such a violation of human rights nor experienced so much misery as I began to see after that protest. At the same time, I stopped believing that anything could change from within and decided that one day I would have to leave. That decision was not mine alone: it reflected the feeling of many young Cubans who understood that staying silent or waiting was no longer an option. It was the start of a new struggle I would have to carry out from elsewhere. The truth is, I never wanted to leave Cuba —not when the papers arrived, not when I boarded the plane, not when I hugged my sister, nor even when I walked the streets of the United States for the first time. I never wanted to leave, but it was July 11 that made me make that decision; it was the moment my mind accepted that, if I wanted to live and not merely survive, if I wanted to exist, speak, shout, and offer dignity to those I love, I would have to leave it.

July 11 was the day I stopped waiting for a miracle for my country. That day showed me the government’s true face, made me understand the cost of courage, and convinced me that change would not come from within Cuba. For me and many, it was not just a protest but the closing of one chapter and the beginning of another: the decision to leave and seek a different future. Since then, I know that if I am going to fight for Cuba, it will be by other means, and never from the inside.

Mabel Toledo Cuéllar is a Cuban citizen living in Houston, Texas. She read Spanish Literature at Universidad de Matanzas and currently is studying sociology at the Lone Star College System, as well as being a students at La Escuela de Escritores de Madrid. She has been awarded literary prizes in poetry and essay writing. Last August she published ublicó “Fidel para Yemayá” in Naguiri Magazine. This is her second colaboración para Perro Negro