HAVANA — On Sunday morning a group of animal-lovers will march a mile down one of Havana’s main thoroughfares waving placards calling for an end to animal cruelty in Cuba.
Short, seemingly simple, the march will write a small but significant line in the history of modern Cuba. The socialist government is explicitly permitting a public march unassociated with any part of the all-encompassing Communist state, a move that participants and historians call highly unusual and perhaps unprecedented since the first years of the revolution.
“It’s a historic event,” said Beatriz Del Carmen Hidalgo-Gato Batista, a 21-year public communications student who received the permit for the march from the Plaza of the Revolution borough of Havana.
There is no indication Cuba is moving toward unfettered freedom of assembly: The state still clamps down on unapproved political speech with swift and massive police mobilizations, waves of arrests and temporary detentions. So a march by independent civil society groups seeking government action will be a remarkable sight in a country where, for nearly 60 years, virtually every aspect of life was part of a single chain of command ending in a supreme leader named Castro.
“It’s unprecedented,” said Alberto Gonzalez, a co-organizer of the march and publisher of The Ark, an online Cuban animal-lovers magazine. “This is going to mark a before and an after.”
Since shortly after its foundation, the Cuban Communist government has only permitted the existence of what it calls “legitimate civil society” - groups overseen, sponsored and managed by the state and Communist Party. Those groups are fixtures in the mass marches and gatherings organized by the state on public holidays. On the other end of the spectrum are dissident groups, often with close ties to anti-Castro forces in Miami who want to overthrow the socialist government and reinstall a capitalist system with close ties to Washington. Their attempts at street protests and other forms of organizing are almost instantly quashed by state security.
The animal-rights march is part of a wider change in the relationship between the Cuban state and independent civil society - Cubans trying to effect change in their society while making clear to everyone, particularly the authorities, that they have no interest in crossing the red line known as “politics.”
In the year since Raul Castro handed the presidency to longtime party technocrat Miguel Diaz-Canel in April 2018, churches, civil society groups and loose associations of like-minded acquaintances have been using the growing availability of internet in Cuba to organize for various causes, and the state has been ceding them a small degree of freedom to operate.
Artists pushed back successfully against a new law regulating artistic expression. Evangelical churches prodded the government to rescind a proposal to legalize gay marriage. Thousands organized online to get private aid to victims of a tornado in Havana in January. Biologist Ariel Ruiz Urquiola was freed from prison after an online campaign by a wide range of Cubans against his one-year sentence for “disrespecting a forest ranger” during a broader campaign against illegal logging and other environmental violations in western Cuba.
“It’s part of a trend toward recognizing civil society, in a tacit manner, sometimes a timid one, but one that’s growing, little by little,” said Yassel Padron Kunakbaeva, a blogger and intellectual who describes him as a Marxist revolutionary.
A 10-year-old private group known as Forest Guardians regularly organizes tree plantings and cleanups of rivers that cross the city of Havana, said organizer Isbel Diaz, a biologist. Last year, the group used $11,000 in small donations to buy a headquarters where it holds workshops and study groups with what it calls a leftist, anti-capitalist orientation.
Diaz said that the group’s first cleanup of the Malecon promenade in 2010 had 14 members picking up trash as several dozen state security agents filmed, took photos and called out threats and insults.
“Activism in Cuba has taken place despite the state,” Diaz said. “In my opinion, it’s not because the state has felt the need to open up, but because it’s had no other option than to accept reality and people with a lot of courage have defied the limits and pushed the boundaries back a little.”
In contrast, when self-employed taxi drivers went on an informal strike to protest new regulations, they were met with a flood of inspections that forced many to stop working.
Animal-rights activism has been a fertile field for organizing in Cuba, where these are no laws against animal abuse and virtually every neighborhood has a resident or two who dedicate hours to feeding, treating and sterilizing street dogs and cats, sometimes with the help of foreigners donating supplies and funds.
The country has one officially recognized animal-rescue group, Aniplant, and perhaps a dozen other small, non-state organizations in Havana and other major cities. In recent years the groups have collected thousands of signatures asking for an animal-protection law, with no success to date.
“What I believe is that, if I live in this country I should try to fight for what I want in this country, and what I want is to help Cuban animals,” said Grettel Montes de Oca Valdes, a professional dancer and founder of the group Cubans in Defense of Animals, whose members will march on Sunday. “I don’t think that we should stop speaking out because if we stop speaking out nothing happens. That method is useless.”
The march is planned to end at the grave of Jeannette Ryder, an American who fought for animal rights in Cuba at the start of 20th century. Aniplant has typically organized what it calls pilgrimages to the grave every April.
In a sign of remaining tensions between the official and unofficial in Cuba, many volunteers from the government-backed animal group are boycotting Sunday’s march and holding their own event next week.
• Associated Press writer Andrea Rodriguez contributed to this report.
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