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Brave Afro-Cubans leading unprecedented protests in Cuba need BLM support | Opinion

Ninety miles from U.S. shores, another powerful reckoning has been playing out in one of Cuba’s poorest and predominantly Black neighborhoods.

Although this movement, too, calls for social and racial justice and inclusion, the unprecedented uprising of people of color on the Caribbean island hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves from Americans — and in particular, from Black Lives Matter activists and supporters.

Where are Havana-strutting Beyonce and Jay-Z and, in fact, where’s President Obama, who encouraged Cubans to seek change and open up to the world?

Their voices are needed at this historical juncture in Cuba: the beginning of a post-Castro era.

The Afro-Cubans of Havana’s San Isidro neighborhood — putting their lives on the line to openly confront the Cuban government — could use widespread support right now. They’re the flashpoint of an unrelenting and brave pushback against government repression, suffering, and economic strife that often runs along racial lines.

With Raúl Castro’s retirement as head of the Communist Party this weekend, there won’t be a Castro leading the country for the first time since 1959. But, without real reforms that establish basic human rights and open economic opportunity for all, this means little to Cubans, who are once again fleeing by sea to South Florida.

After he succeeded Fidel, the second Castro brother was seen as a reformist, but he failed to deliver, miserably. Instead of opening the country to modernity, Raúl Castro installed another loathed despot as president, Miguel Díaz-Canel.

All of them white men who made a lot of socia- justice promises, yet destroyed Cuba and left Black citizens to carry the worst of burdens, to make the most sacrifices for a Revolution that continues to betray them.

Cuba’s budding civil society asks to be heard as island prepares for historic congress

Repression endures

With or without a Castro at the helm, Castroist oppression remains embedded in society, from policing practices that arbitrarily sends people to jail, often Black men and women, to the 2019 rewrite of the Constitution under Díaz-Canel that criminalizes independent artistic expression.

The San Isidro movement began organically as a group of young artists opposed to the censorship measure, Ley 349, and gained strength as more artists, writers, musicians and independent journalists called for a dialogue about free expression.

The government refused to listen and continued arrests, harassment and surveillance, but the artists didn’t let up the pressure. Dozens of artists, intellectuals, and journalists, among them big names in art and film, showed up last Nov. 27 in front of the Ministry of Culture’s building in Havana, demanding to be heard.

Brutally repressed Cuban artists are protesting. Believe me, it’s not Miami’s doing | Opinion

A soundtrack for change

On the streets, the leaders of the San Isidro movement are mostly Afro-Cuban artists and their anthem and rallying cry, “Patria y Vida,” — “Homeland and Life” — is a powerful Cuban rap and reggaetón song that bravely tells the regime: “Enough!”

Basta ya.

No more “trampling on an entire people’s dignity,” they rap. No more paradise in Varadero for foreigners while “Cuban mothers cry for their fleeing children.” No more treating us “like animals.”

The interpreters of the song are four defiant, visually stunning Black musicians, one of them shirtless with the call for “Patria y Vida” painted on his taut abs. Another is a member of the group Gente de Zona, once vetoed in Miami for seeming to be pro-Castro. At one point, a member appears wearing a hoodie, a garment packed with meaning.

This is the Cuban left protesting against the Cuban left — and the most hopeful note is that the rallying anthem and its cry for freedoms have caught on both in Miami and Havana.

“The deception is over,” they sing. “It’s time to create what we dreamed of and what you destroyed with your hands.”

The video has more than 4.6 million views on YouTube, yet I haven’t seen it make the Twitter feeds of American artists rightly advocating on behalf of BLM.

To see people, Black and white, on a crumbling street in San Isidro singing “Patria y Vida” — led by one of the rappers, Maykel Osorbo, wearing a dangling handcuff link — to see them catcall Díaz-Canel, may seem par for the course for Americans accustomed to Black Lives Matter protests.

But, in Cuba, it can be suicide.

“#PatriayVida is a worldwide movement that belongs to all of us Cubans who demand freedom and democracy in Cuba,” Osborbo posted on Instagram. “Art has more force than a dictatorship.”

It seems so at this moment.

The movement has grown outside of humble San Isidro and incorporated a rainbow of advocates who’ve penned the “27N manifesto” wisely using language of the left that people on the island understand to outline what a new Cuba should look like.

It’s time for the American left to embrace a new day for Cuba.

Cuban Black lives matter, too.