Small Town Shelters a Woman Who Stands Up to Cuban Regime
Yasmary Gonzalez has covered her house with graffiti against the dictatorship and for freedom.
HAVANA TIMES – A State Security agent on a motorcycle arrived at the small town of Las Tosas, 11 kilometers from Sancti Spíritus, to ask what was happening. The reason? A simple blue house appeared full of huge white graffiti that made the text stand out even more.
“Miguel Díaz-Canel, get out of Cuba”, “Down with the dictatorship”, “No to Cuban communism”, “Freedom”, “No more hunger”, “No more blackouts”, “Freedom for Cuba”. There is barely a gap in the façade and at the entrance to the home of Yasmary González Martínez, who did not hesitate to take her photograph drawing with her fingers the symbolic L for ‘libertad’, with which activists demand freedom.
“Last night,” she told 14ymedio this Wednesday, “a State Security agent came on a motorcycle. He threatened me, the same as always. He said to remove the posters painted on the walls of my house and we argued. The neighbors, upon hearing my voice, came out to ask me what was happening and the guy left.”
González Martínez, a hairdresser by profession, is not new to this, but she is noticing a recent change among those around her. “My neighbors comment that I am right, although they do not express it themselves,” she explains to this newspaper. “So far, they have not carried out hate rallies. My neighbors are not willing to do that, since when State Security comes to my house, they go out into the street, and, if they as much as touch me, my neighbors will defend me.”
According to González, the Cuban government “plays with the people’s pain” and is not interested in their survival. “The hatred that this misgovernment has sown in the heart of every Cuban is so great that we want them to leave power,” she maintains.
The Sancti Spiritus resident argues that she painted the walls of her house to express that she is not “afraid of the dictatorship, that there is a future.” She says that she is tired of children being poorly fed, that the elderly do not have medicines and that there are political prisoners. “We want no more brothers killed by Cuba’s implanted communism, it is time to break the chains that have bound us for more than 60 years,” she cries.
González has compromised her own house to give precise voice to the people of Sancti Spiritus, but her poster is not the only one against the Government found in Cuba in recent days. One of the ones that has achieved the most popularity is the one that appeared on the beach El Tenis, on the viaduct in the city of Matanzas, on which you could read “Díaz-Canel singao*”.
For this type of graffiti against Díaz-Canel or the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), there have been arrests and prison sentences in Cuba recently. This is the case of Yasmany González Valdés, who was prosecuted in February for enemy propaganda and for whom the Prosecutor’s Office requested 6 years in prison, of the eight that this type of crime can entail. In his case, the activist acknowledged being the author of several posters in Havana that simply read, “No to the PCC (Communist Party of Cuba).”
Translator’s note:
*‘singao’ is commonly translated as ‘motherfucker’.
Translated by Norma Whiting for Translating Cuba