The day before Fidel Castro’s birthday every August 13th, legend had it that Cubans lost their fear and carried out minor acts of protest and sabotage in the middle of the night. As I later documented in the introduction to my book Visions of Power in Cuba, the fact of this activism became clear to me when I unexpectedly encountered not only the evidence that someone had spray painted “Abajo Fidel [Down with Fidel]” on the side of a building near the stadium in August 2005, but I also encountered the cover-up! Clear as day, a citizen’s cry of protest had been badly covered up with plaster and the words painted over with its opposite, a proclamation of support. Where it had once said “Down with Fidel,” the wall now read “Long Live Fidel!” When I pulled out my enormous Nikon digital camera that day, every one gathered on that block quickly scattered. As so many people had told me over the previous ten years, the state could not just cover the evidence of citizens’ protests and desire for change, it had to falsify the record and make them attest to what they did not believe. August 2005.
