Cuban dissident movement
By the end of 1960, according to Paul H. Lewis in Authoritarian Regimes in Latin America, all opposition newspapers had been closed down and all radio and television stations were under state control.
[16] According to a paper published in the Harvard International Review, dissident groups are weak and infiltrated by Cuban state security.
[16] In 2012, Amnesty International warned that repression of Cuban dissidents was on the rise over the past two years, citing the Wilmar Villar hunger strike death, as well as the arrests of prisoners of conscience Yasmin Conyedo Riveron, Yusmani Rafael Alvarez Esmori, and Antonio Michel and Marcos Máiquel Lima Cruz.
[33] To the original list of 75 prisoners of conscience resulting from the wave of arrests in spring 2003, Amnesty International added four more dissidents in January 2004.
Tripartite talks between the Cuban government, the Catholic Church in Cuba and the Spanish government were initiated in spring 2010 in reaction to the controversial death of political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo in February 2010 following a hunger strike amid reports of massive abuse at the hands of prison staff.
[35] The Foreign Policy magazine named Yoani Sánchez one of the 10 Most Influential Intellectuals of Latin America, the only woman on the list.
[38] An article in El Nuevo Herald by Ivette Leyva Martinez,[39] speaks to the role played by Yoani Sanchez and other young people, outside the Cuban opposition and dissidence movements, in working towards a free and democratic Cuba today: Amid the paralysis of the dissident movement, bloggers, with Yoani Sánchez in the lead, rebel artists such as the writer Orlando Luís Pardo, and musicians such as Gorki Aguila are a promising sign of growing civic resistance to the Cuban dictatorship.
The youngest sector of Cuban society is the one least committed to the dictatorship but at the same time the most apolitical, the one most permeated with political skepticism, escapism, and other similar "isms".
Finally, a breeze of fresh, hopeful air.On 29 March 2009, at Tania Bruguera's performance where a podium with an open mic was staged for people to have one minute of uncensored public speech, Sánchez was among people to publicly criticize censorship in Cuba and said that "the time has come to jump over the wall of control".
The signers include blogger Yoani Sanchez and hunger striker Guillermo Farinas, as well as Elizardo Sanchez, head of Cuba's most prominent human rights group and Miriam Leiva, who helped found the Damas de Blanco, or Ladies in White, a group of wives and mothers of jailed dissidents.
The letter supports a bill introduced on 23 February by Rep. Collin Peterson, a Minnesota Democrat, that would bar the president from prohibiting travel to Cuba or blocking transactions required to make such trips.
In 2009, following the end of his 17-year imprisonment, Antúnez, his wife Iris, and Diosiris Santana Pérez started a hunger strike to support other political prisoners.
As part of his claim, Zapata was asking for the prisoners conditions to be comparable to those that Fidel Castro had while incarcerated after his 1953 attack against the Moncada Barracks.
[55] More than one million Cubans of all social classes have left the island to the United States,[56] and to Spain, the UK, Canada, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and other countries.
[The U.S.A is] depressing the standard of living of the population and at the same time pouring millions of US taxpayer dollars into urging people to act against the [Cuban] government,"[3]
