On a sweltering August day during the bleak scarcity of the so-called Special Period, Cuba’s economic crisis in the mid-Nineties following the collapse of the Soviet Union, hundreds of ragged and desperate Cubans marched through the streets of central Havana shouting “¡Libertad!” (freedom). That march, on August 5, 1994, which was captured on snippets of grainy film and has been airbrushed from official Cuban history ever since, came to be known as the Maleconazo, as it took place along the sea wall, the Malecon.
Until last week, the Maleconazo was one of the only documented and large-scale protests Cuba’s dictatorship has faced in recent decades. Yet on Friday, Nov. 27, a crowd of around 300 artists, intellectuals, and activists stunned the Cuban leadership by gathering outside the Ministry of Culture to protest against the lack of free expression and demand the liberation of imprisoned rapper, Denis Solís González.
