At least 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend the schools across the country, which were funded by the federal government and run by churches as part of the campaign to strip the youth of their cultural identity.
“We understand that many of our brothers and sisters from our neighbouring communities attended the Kuper Island industrial school. We also recognized with a tremendous amount of grief and loss that too many did not return home,” said chief Joan Brown in the statement.
Members of the Penelakut Tribe in south-western British Columbia said in a statement late on Monday that the graves had been discovered near the site of the Kuper Island industrial school on Penelakut Island, nearly 90km north of the provincial capital Victoria.
A First Nations community in western Canada has announced the discovery of at least 160 unmarked graves close to a former residential school – the latest in a series of grim announcements from across the country in recent weeks.
Cuban exiles in Miami announced seemingly half-baked plans to make the 10-hour boat journey from Florida to Cuba on Monday to offer the protesters supplies, support and perhaps even guns. The US coast guard indicated it was unlikely to allow flotillas to undertake the “dangerous and unforgivi...
Albares, who was appointed foreign minister in Spain’s Socialist-led coalition government over the weekend, stopped short of condemning recent events in Cuba. In a statement released on Tuesday morning, his ministry urged Cuban authorities to “speed up the pace of reform” to help the island...
Rodríguez also slammed Bolsonaro after he accused Cuba of “massacring” its people’s freedoms. “Brazil’s president should sort out his performance which has contributed to the deplorable death of hundreds of thousands of Brazilians from Covid … and worry about the acts of corruption h...
In a televised broadcast Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez, hit back, attacking the “extraordinary cynicism and hypocrisy” of US politicians. Rodríguez urged the US president to stop the “brutal repression” that US police forces inflict on African Americans and journalists.
On Monday, Joe Biden called on Cuban authorities to respect citizen’s rights, “including the right of peaceful protest and the right to freely determine their own future”.
“Police are repressive everywhere. But that’s not what’s proclaimed here – in Cuba they are supposed to be an organ of the people, they are supposed to protect the people.”
Marta María Ramírez, 46, a feminist and LGBT activist, said she knew dozens of people who had been arrested, among them Gretel Medina, a young film director who is breastfeeding her baby son. “I’m very sad about the violent response from authorities,” Ramírez said.
Guevara-Rosas said internet shutdowns meant it was hard to verify the precise scale of the crackdown on demonstrators, who had been protesting against shortages of food and medicine as well as one-party rule. But targets appeared to include prominent human rights campaigners, independent journali...
Carolina Barrero, a Havana-based activist, said the wave of detentions were intended “to erase” Sunday’s demonstrations and ensure there was no repeat. “ is a dictatorship – this is what they do,” Barrero said from her home in Havana, where she has been under house arrest since June.
On Monday Díaz-Canel painted the protests – which erupted as Cuba faces a severe economic crunch exacerbated by US sanctions and a Covid pandemic that has shattered the island’s tourist industry – as part of a foreign plot to “fracture” the communist revolution launched by Fidel Cast...
Earlier this month the group Reporters Without Borders named the Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, as one of the “press freedom predators” of 2021, alongside Nicaragua’s authoritarian leader, Daniel Ortega, and Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, and called Cuba “Latin Amer...
On Tuesday Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, demanded the immediate release of Camila Acosta, a Cuban journalist who reports for a Spanish newspaper and was among those seized from their homes in the capital early on Monday.
“The idea is to punish those who dare to challenge the government … and send a message” that no further protests would be tolerated, said Guevara-Rosas, who said spontaneous and peaceful rallies had taken place in at least 48 separate locations, including Havana.
Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s Americas director, said at least 140 Cubans were believed to have been detained or had disappeared in the aftermath of Cuba’s largest demonstrations in decades.
Scores of Cuban activists, protesters and journalists, including a reporter for one of Spain’s leading newspapers, have reportedly been detained as Communist party security forces seek to smother Sunday’s historic flare-up of dissent.