Opponent Yunior García: “The Cuban tyranny has turned into an abusive husband who beats his wife”

One day after taking refuge in Madrid, the prominent Cuban opponent Yunior García Aguilera He asked the world to stop seeing his country with “romanticism” and to understand that the communist regime has become for the people like “an abusive husband who beats his wife.”

In his first press conference in the Spanish capital, the leader of the archipelago opposition group admitted that his departure deals a “painful blow” to the dissent and caused “disappointment” among his followers.

But the promoter of the demonstration last Monday, frustrated by Cuban security forces, guaranteed that he will not request asylum in Spain, where he is with his partner on a 90-day tourist visa, and that he plans to return “when my life and my life wife are not in danger ”.

With its characteristic youthful air, Junior Garcia He said that Cubans cannot “remain slaves,” but neither can they “achieve freedom at a cost so high that it includes the loss of hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives.”

“The only way to avoid both is if the international community stops looking the other way, stops ignoring what is happening in Cuba (…) We must stop seeing it with the romanticism of the 60s and we must assume in what a revolution has become ”, said the 39-year-old playwright.

“He has become an abusive husband who beats his wife, he has become a Saturn who has already devoured his children and right now he is swallowing his grandchildren,” he continued, describing the regime as “brutal tyranny as is seldom known. has seen”.

As Monday’s demonstration was banned by the government, finally frustrated by a large deployment of government security forces who believed that its organizers were seeking to provoke regime change with the support of the United States, Yunior García announced that he would be marching solo on Sunday, November 14.

But that day Cuban security agents prevented him from leaving his home, cut off his landlines and mobile phones, and dozens of pro-government supporters took up positions in front of his building in Havana.

Until that day, Garcia, He had not made the decision to leave, despite the harassment suffered by both he and his family in previous weeks, he had applied for a visa for Spain.

One day he even found two decapitated pigeons in front of his house. “If we stayed in Cuba they behead us, we have seen ourselves reflected in those two pigeons,” he said, noting that although the authorities had not attacked him so as not to turn him into “a symbol”, they did seek to “annul him” as a person.

– “Sorry for being human” –

On his abrupt departure, he said he understood the “pain” and “disappointment” generated in his followers.

“I will be able to forgive myself, perhaps for not having had the courage to turn to stone and to turn myself into a bronze statue. Perhaps apologize for being human, for thinking about my wife and my life, and for escaping from what was surely going to constitute a living death, because that is what awaited me in Cuba, “he said.

But “in no case am I going to resign or give up to do what I can for the people who stayed in Cuba,” he promised.

Regarding the fact that he was able to leave Cuba on a commercial flight, he estimated: “The power in Cuba is totalitarian, obviously if they had wanted to, they would have prevented me from leaving.”

Spain granted him the visa to prevent him from having “problems in Cuba,” the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, explained this Thursday on radio Onda Cero.

Spain has been the destination of many political exiles from Latin America in recent times, particularly Venezuelans.

In the Spanish capital, for example, the Venezuelan Leopoldo López and the Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez, notorious detractors of the governments of their countries, took refuge.

Madrid is also home to Cuban dissidents. Dozens of them arrived in the early 2010s, after being released by the authorities thanks to the mediation of the Catholic Church.