MIAMI — A small group of Cuban seniors silently circled the Cuban Memorial, slowly running their fingers over the names etched in the black marble.
"Un pueblo unido en el dolor," a plaque at the foot of the monument reads. "A people united in pain."
In the background, voices shouted through megaphones from a stage: "Cuba libre! Free Cuba!" — igniting the crowd of hundreds who had come to a Miami-area park on a rainy evening to show solidarity for Cubans protesting in defiance of the dictatorship on the island.
As Alberto Jimenez, 87, stood near the monument listening to the chants from the rally, a torrential rain started and several young protesters immediately rushed to shelter him with their umbrellas.
"Don't worry, we'll stand here with you," Olga Rodriguez, 18, told Jimenez.
It was the first protest Rodriguez and her friends had ever attended, and her words carried meaning beyond just protecting Jimenez from the rain. She and the hundreds of other young Cubans who have joined protests here and on the island in recent days reflect what some see as a changing of the guard. They believe they can win the fight started by their parents and grandparents. Some of their elders do, too.
"These young people, they will help make this change for freedom," said Jimenez, who was born in Cuba and spent 15 years in prison as a young man during the early years of Fidel Castro's rule.
Massive street protests in Cuba last weekend — the largest demonstrations against the government there in decades — mobilized young Cuban Americans in cities across Florida to protest in support of their peers on the island. They have rallied to rap music in Little Havana, wrapped themselves in Cuban flags, blocked major highways in Miami and Tampa, and through social media shared news and information about the government crackdown on the island in the days since Cubans there took to the streets in record numbers.
The Cuban Americans leading the rallies in Florida are two generations removed from those who led the fight against the Castro regime in the early 1960s, and most of them have never been to Cuba. But they have been raised on the stories of their grandparents and parents, many of whom were imprisoned by the communist regime, or fled the island on homemade rafts and survived the dangerous sea journey across the Florida straits.
Osdanys Veloz, 24, is planning to sail a flotilla of supporters to Cuba next week.
"The plan is stay in international waters, to show support," said Veloz, a contractor from Miami. "We're thinking that if we show the population in Cuba that they have our support, and that we're there for them, that will have an impact."
Veloz wants the boat captains to fire flares as they reach the territorial sea of Cuba, 12 miles offshore.
"They will definitely see us 12 miles out," he said.
The pull of the Cuban homeland for people who have never been there is strong among young Cuban Americans in Miami, and this week's protests have given them a way to show it. Danny Martinez has never been to Cuba, but his parents were born there. They fled during the Mariel boatlift, the mass emigration of more than 120,000 Cubans to the United States in 1980.
Martinez, 38, said the alarming videos from Sunday's protests in Cuba were a wake-up call for him, especially when he saw his mother's reaction. He said he has always used the words "brothers and sisters" to show support for Cubans he's never met, but he was generalizing.
"But I realized that for my mom, those really are her brothers and sisters," Martinez said.
Martinez, coalitions director for the LIBRE Initiative-Florida, said that he has heard stories throughout his life about his relatives who are still in Cuba, but that he started thinking about them differently after the recent protests broke out.
"The heartache my mom was feeling trying to make sure she could account for everybody in her family, I felt that pain," Martinez said. "Those of us in the younger generations who have never been there and never met family still there, we need to be reminded of that."
Daniel Pedreira, a professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University, said young Cubans in Florida are seizing on a historic moment.
"We haven't seen a spontaneous, national-level series of protests in one day in Cuba since the 1962 movement," said Pedreira, who has written two books about Cuban political figures. "And it's very interesting to see here in Miami, the young Cuban Americans that I've talked to, there's a palpable excitement."
Pedreira said young Cubans on the island have grown up in a very different Cuba from the one exiled Floridians fled. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel doesn't command the respect or fear that Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl Castro did, he said. The Cuban protesters in the United States have picked up on that. They've made the hip-hop song "Patria y Vida" (Homeland and Life), recorded by a group of dissident rappers, their anthem. The YouTube video has been viewed more than 6 million times.
"The young people make up unprintable nicknames for Díaz-Canel. They have no respect for him," Pedreira said. "He doesn't have control over the country like the Castros did, and that kind of lifts the veil of fear. Now you're seeing younger Cubans changing the tone of how they want to live. They're no longer just talking about leaving the island; they're talking about staying to fight for a free future and rebuilding Cuba."
Gabriella Castañeda, 25, stood through the rain at the Cuban Memorial earlier this week to join the rally. Both her parents escaped the island and settled in Miami.
"If they're brave enough to take to the streets in Cuba against that repressive regime, we can stand a little rain," said Castañeda, who also participated in Black Lives Matter protests last summer following the killing of George Floyd. "We want the people of Cuba to know the exile community stands with them."
Her parents watched from nearby as she joined in chants of "Si Cuba está en las calles, Miami también." If Cuba is in the streets, Miami is, too.
"She always tells me, 'Dad, I am American-born, but my heart is Cuban,' " said her father, Lazaro Casteñeda.
He said he's not surprised that young Cuban Americans are leading protest rallies, because "the youth, as history has shown, is the driving force of revolutions that create the radical change."
He said he's proud of his daughter.
"One of my many tasks as an exiled Cuban was to spread the culture to my family and not let it die from when I left the island," Castañeda said. "She is a clear example that I was successful."
Back by the memorial, Jimenez thanked the young women who had sheltered him in the downpour. Then, as they raised their voices as part of the demonstration, he joined them.
"Patria y vida, patria y vida," they chanted together. "Homeland and life."
