The Cuban voices at the centre of this briefing, describe feeling weighed down and suffocated in their daily lives. Successive decades of disproportionate and arbitrary use of the criminal law and campaigns of state-sponsored discrimination against those who dare to speak out or try to leave the country has contributed to this feeling. Discriminatory dismissals from state-employment, and arbitrary harassment of self-employed workers in the private sector, as an additional layer of state control, and the lack of an effective recourse to challenge them, has created a profound climate of fear in Cuba.
