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Cuba: Too Many Victims, No Scandal Big Enough

By Marleidy Muñoz (El Toque)

HAVANA TIMES — In Cuba, and in its exile community, there are too many victims. Each story shakes us for a few days. It circulates on social media, sparks outrage, makes headlines. And then, almost always, little by little, it fades from view. Not because the injustice has been resolved, but because a new one is about to happen.

In authoritarian regimes, repression is not only exercised: it is managed, normalized. It is an endless succession of abuses that rarely reach a climax. There is no single scandal that changes everything, but rather many small scandals that accumulate without ever breaking the system.

For decades, Cuban institutions have operated with the certainty that international complaints, reports from human rights organizations, or outrage on social media rarely produce real consequences. Prolonged impunity ends up generating a culture of power in which punishing dissent becomes the natural way the State functions. The machinery is also sustained by absolute control over the courts, the media, and public spaces where these injustices could become scandals. And the authorities know it: outrage usually lasts less than impunity.

While the world watches the latest injustice, previous ones begin to fade from public memory. When repression is constant and affects so many people at the same time, individual cases end up losing visibility.

Not because each one doesn’t matter, but because the next story is already waiting.

How do you break a system when no injustice manages to be the last?

M, the artist who went from performance and hunger strikes against the regime to years in prison. The rapper Maykel “Osorbo.” There are the hundreds sentenced after the July 11 protests, influencers and digital creators imprisoned for what they said in a video or a post; the young man who held up a sign on San Rafael Street and spent years in prison. Those who have died........

© Havana Times