This post wasn’t sent on the 25th due to technical and other difficulties. I apologise.

When days dawn like on this Feb. 24th, cloudy, threatening rain, the sun barely peeking through, everyone usually says the day is sad. At least that is what I’ve always heard since I’ve had awareness. But today there are several reasons to support it.

The early news, on shortwave, was of the death of Tamayo, a prisoner of conscience, after nearly ninety days on hunger strike, and that the Cuban authorities had left him to die, and that only yesterday, because of the imminence of death, was he taken to hospital where his mother barely managed to see him alive. The tremulous voice of this broken woman on the airwaves, I shuddered: Her son was cruelly neglected and left to die serving an unjust sentence of 25 years for contempt. Inconceivable that in the 21st century there are such offenses to justify the imprisonment of a human being, young and full of life, and condemn him to this slow death only to defend his ideas. What they are going to say of this, the Church, the European Parliament, the OEA, this myriad of institutions and leaders, who in cases less dramatic, but foreign to this island, demonstrate without delay. The least the family and friends of this young man, who just lost his life languishing in Cuban jails in subhuman conditions, can expect is that those voices rise up, and denounce to the world what is happening right now in our country.

Moreover, today is also the anniversary of the destruction in international airspace of planes belonging to Brothers to the Rescue. That solitary event that is mourned once again by Cubans here and in the diaspora.

I remembered that even in the worst moments in the history of our country acts such as these were not under the complicity of silence. When the young Julio Antonio Mella declared a hunger strike during the dictatorship of Machado, the Cuban press covered the news day by day and the impact was huge inside and outside our borders, and it meant that the life of another young man was saved. Few people know what happened here today. In the street everyone followed the same daily routine as always: gray, neutral, sullen, just like the day. Today that “Shout of Baire,” commemorating the beginning of the War of Independence on this day in 1895, was drowned out by the silence.

Translated by Araby