Cuban parents denounced that the communist Castro regime is pushing a false narrative of the events of the July 2021 wave of anti-communism protests to students in new schoolbooks, Martí Noticias reported on Tuesday.
Cuban students began the new 2026-2027 school year on September 1. The new school period comes at a time when the island nation faces an extremely complex situation caused by the years-long collapse of communism, leading to worsening shortages of supplies, not enough teachers to cover all of the nation’s education centers, and worsening, often nationwide, power blackouts than can last for days.
The Castro regime, which has ruled Cuba for over 67 years, has an extensive track record of pushing communist indoctrination to children and teenagers at Cuban schools through its complete control of the nation’s education system. Cuban parents who wish not to have their children subjected to the communist education system and homeschool their children are instead subjected to relentless persecution by regime officials.
Martí Noticias detailed that Cuban parents have taken to social media to denounce that a new Political Culture book issued by the Castro regime for tenth-grade students contains contents related to the historic wave of anti-communism protests that took place across Cuba in July 2021 — however, far from an accurate account of the events, the book claims that reports from international outlets released at the time of the protests and the regime’s subsequent repression of the anti-communist dissidents were “fake news.”
“In Cuba, there are no scientific or economic advances… but our children will certainly be up to date on the ideological matters our government wants them to know (…) Political indoctrination in Cuba lasts from the moment you’re born until the moment you die,” Cuban influencer Espinosa wrote on social media, sharing images of the regime’s new schoolbooks.
In reality, about 187,000 Cubans took to the streets in almost every Cuban city and town on July 11, 2021, to demand an end to the Castro regime and its brutal, six-decades long authoritarian rule over Cuba. At the time, the regime’s figurehead “president,” Miguel Diaz-Canel, issued an “order of combat” to communists to physically attack anyone they suspected of opposing the regime.
The Castro regime’s brutal repression of the anti-communist protesters resulted in over a thousand confirmed arrests and an equal number of reported disappeared. In the following years, the ruling communists have carried out sham trials to unjustly and excessively punish some of the protests’ participants.
Some of the Cuban regime officials involved in the repression and unjust sentencing of the protesters later managed to find their way into the United States, availing themselves of the lax open border policies of the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden to make their way into America. Some of the most notable cases include Cuban Interior Ministry official Daniel Morejón García and Judge Melody González Pedraza — both of whom were deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2025 during the administration of President Donald Trump.
Speaking to Martí Noticias on Tuesday, Cuban journalist and researcher Boris González Arenas questioned what the Castro regime refers to as the concept of “political culture” pushed by the ruling communists through the Cuban education system with the goal of reproducing the culture of a “totalitarian regime.”
The Cuban journalist detailed that the new indoctrination books do not clearly identify their respective authors, simply listing a man he identified as an Education Ministry official, Orlando Calderón Frías, as the texts’ “compiler.”
“What kind of political culture would a country want to promote when it has an election law that ensures there are no elections?” González Arenas asked.
“Of course, the case of the children who were detained, held captive for days, and then confined will not be addressed, nor will the murder of Diubis Laurencio Tejeda,” he continued, referring to a 36-year-old Cuban protester who was shot in the back by Cuban police officers during the July 2021 protests.