The Wall Came Down 34 Years Ago Despite Fear and Loathing 

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 not talk about the causes, along with the widespread discontent for reasons very similar to those in Cuba, bridging the gap between a European society and a Latin American one, the hot topic was, as it is among Cubans, the free movement of people.

In this aspect, an Island has its disadvantages, which make the situation even more difficult, as there are no land borders. It is said that the government of the defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR), please do not go by the names because in this the communists are specialists in hiding the real meaning of the words, well, a law was being discussed to “make easier” the transit between Germanys, which that wall built by the communists prevented.

Someone, a journalist from the western side, spoke lightly, perhaps expressing his desire more than an official note, saying that free transit was a fact or would be that same day. It was more than enough, the rumor spread from mouth to mouth, today’s Internet did not yet exist, and people overflowed from the East to the West. Overnight, between November 9 and 10, a 100-mile wall literally disappeared. And Communism was over.

The explanation is simple: the Germans lost their fear. There is no police force capable of withstanding an avalanche of one hundred thousand people. The repressors bet on the fear of the opponent. No one wants to be the first to immolate themselves, nor to be the second or third of the fallen, however, while fear paralyzes, day by day more and more victims are added, selectively and relentlessly.

Today in Cuba, I repeat, there are 1,052 people imprisoned for demonstrating publicly on July 11 and during the following days until today, calling for a better government in the face of the current one’s  inability to resolve the basic needs of the population.

If we make history, a thousand is little, but we must add those shot without a fair trial, those slowly criminalized in prisons, those shot while escaping, along with those devoured at sea, whose total number requires additional zeros.

But even so, the paradox is that the perpetrators are also Cubans, I almost say, the same as you, the repressed, but very much we are all the same, although the circumstances, the place we occupy in society, separate us. Such differences tend to be erased precisely when a majority overrides the paralysis imposed by fear.

How we Cubans will achieve the inevitable final result, which is to tear down the invisible wall, as long as the entire island, that today prevents us from being free on our own land, no one seems to know exactly.

In our favor we have the internet: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and even WhatsApp that cannot be interfered with. Speaking of blocking, they will continue to block our communications, but, to paraphrase Lincoln, they cannot do it to everyone or all the time.

You have to pay attention to the signs; they will always come. Then there will be no police, no black berets, not even tanks, capable of stopping a crowd.

As happened before in Moscow’s Red Square, in ours, that of the disappeared idea of a supposed Revolution, the mothers will get on the tanks, asking the tank drivers, surely boys who could be their sons, if they have the balls to shoot at them.

And then the Cuban wall will go to hell, a fashionable phrase these days, associated with the word Freedom.

Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.