Cubans around the world marked the fourth anniversary on Friday of the nationwide protests on the island in 2021 in which thousands of people flooded the streets of nearly every major city to demand an end to communism.
As of July 11, 2025, 65 percent of the known political prisoners held captive in Cuba were arrested as part of the 2021 crackdown, according to the human rights organization Prisoners Defenders. The group, which tracks the arrest of Cubans for expressing anti-communist sentiments, reported the existence of 1,158 political prisoners in Cuba still behind bars as of this month; 752 of those were arrested in relation to the 2021 protests. Estimates suggest Cuban state security arrested as many as 8,000 people on July 11, 2021.
“The reasons that triggered [the protests] are still present and have worsened since then: the total absence of freedoms, the repression and the shortages of food, medicine,” Javier Larrondo, the president of Prisoners Defenders, said in a statement to Breitbart News, “and services of all kinds such as health, electricity, or running water still form part of the day to day of Cubans, and even with more precariousness than they had on July 11, 2021.”
Larrondo emphasized that Western countries other than the United States continue to bankroll the abuse of Cuban citizens through tourism and business deals with Castro regime entities.
“We bring attention in our study to the inaction of democratic countries such as Canada, Norway, or the European Union after four years,” he continued, “an act of coexistence [with the regime], of hypocrisy, of a lack of humanity and/or of lack of political intelligence.”
“Globalization, well understood, presupposes an inherent responsibility that these countries elude when they are, as they are being currently, submitting via silence before crimes against humanity committed in Cuba by the regime,” Larrondo concluded. “Crimes against humanity of this savagery… are incompatible with the concepts of sovereignty and non-intervention.”
Prisoners Defenders’ statistics are likely a significant underrepresentation of the true number of political prisoners in the country as it documents only those imprisoned and charged with political crimes such as “disrespect” for the regime, “sedition,” or “public disorder.” The regime often tosses known dissidents in jail for beatings and torture in short spurts without charging them with anything and releases them, making those cases nearly impossible to fully document. Among the most famous of such cases is that of Ladies in White leader Berta Soler, who has faced beatings and arrests on a weekly basis for years but is never charged with any violations of the law.
Cubans took the streets on that day shouting “freedom” and demanding respect for their basic human rights — a reality that the administration of then-President Joe Biden attempted to obscure by claiming the protesters were upset about the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. A study by the Cuban Conflict Observatory (OCC), a non-governmental organization (NGO), estimated that over 187,000 people on the island participated in the peaceful protests on July 11. The protests were so impactful that administration officials under former President Joe Biden admitted that they prevented Biden from executing his plan to reimpose the disastrous policies of the Obama era when he had served as vice president.
“After July 11, we hit the pause button,” National Security Council senior director for the Western Hemisphere under Biden Juan Gonzalez said in a 2021 interview. “There’s a rule before July 11 and after July 11.”
The Castro regime responded to the protests with outsized violence. “President” Miguel Díaz-Canel, a figurehead representing true dictator Raúl Castro, appeared on television and declared that the “order of combat was issued” — communist civilians were commanded to assault suspected protesters as violently as possible. Busloads of thugs armed with sticks began appearing in Havana, the largest urban center, prepared to brutalize protesters.
Cubans have consistently protested against their criminal communist regime in the decades since it came to power in a violent coup in 1959. Waves of increasingly gruesome repression have suppressed the impact of these protests through the imprisonment, torture, disappearance, and murder by firing squad of the most vocal opponents of Marxist ideology on the island. The Castro regime has funded its extermination of dissidents throughout the years through both the support of fellow communist regimes, including China and the Soviet Union, as well as tourism from so-called “democratic” Western states.
In the 20th century, beatings and forced disappearances of Cuban freedom fighters dramatically escalated during the administration of former President Barack Obama who announced a dramatic weakening of American policies to keep U.S. dollars out of the hands of Cuba’s most violent communists. Leftist American celebrities made vacation stops in Cuba trendy, splurging in regime-controlled hotels and other luxury stops, thereby funding Cuba’s “black beret” anti-dissident forces. The Obama administration insisted that the Cuban regime would use that largess to improve the lives of its citizens, but it instead invested the money into its state security apparatus for silencing dissent.
“The policies during the period of 2008-2016 were a disaster. They gave more strength and legitimacy to the Castro tyranny and increased repression with impunity,” Cuban former political prisoner and human rights advocate Dr. Óscar Elías Biscet explained to Breitbart News in 2020. President Trump reversed many of Obama’s concessions to the Castros during his first term in office, which Biscet predicted would loosen the iron-fisted repression suffocating freedom of thought in Cuba.
“With the change of direction in 2017 by the current government, [the United States] has shown the leaders of the dictatorship that consequences exist for violations of the human rights of the Cuban people and that the American government [supports] liberty and democracy alongside the Cubans — not just in theory, but in practice,” he stated.
President Trump rolled back some of Obama’s most outrageous concessions to the Castro regime, including banning American cruise ships from stopping in stolen Cuban ports and “people-to-people” travel to the island, a loophole used to override restrictions on American tourism to America. The changes preceded the largest eruption of peaceful protest on the island this century.
The Trump administration acknowledged the anniversary this week with several public statements and a gathering of human rights leaders in the American embassy in Havana. Secretary of State Marco Rubio addressed the gathering on Tuesday, honoring their sacrifices to weaken the stranglehold of the Communist Party on their people.
“I know that for many it is easier to abandon the country than stay there and fight for the future, for a free and sovereign Cuba,” Rubio told those assembled. “But I want you to know that you have our support, the support of our embassy, of a community in the United States that knows that you are suffering from shortages of everything, of medicine, electricity, and more, and who know that that is all the product of a regime that simply does not know how to govern a country.”
“I want you to know that we support you, that we always have your cause at the forefront of all that we do, that we speak of you everywhere we are given an opportunity, and we pray every day for God to bless you and for Cuba to be free, sovereign, independent soon,” he concluded,” and that destiny be in the hands of your people.”
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