Cuba grapples with protest fallout
Biden hails ‘clarion call for freedom’ by demonstrators
Large contingents of Cuban police patrolled the capital of Havana on Monday following rare protests around the island nation against food shortages, power outages, high prices and a worrying lack of medicine amid the coronavirus crisis. Cuba’s president said the demonstrations were stirred up on social media by Cuban Americans in the United States.
President Joe Biden on Monday called on the Cuban government to heed the demands of thousands of citizens who took to the streets Sunday to protest power outages, food shortages and a worrying lack of medicine.
“We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom,” Biden said in a statement. “The United States calls on the Cuban regime to hear their people and serve their needs at this vital moment rather than enriching themselves.”
His comments followed a day of astonishing demonstrations in Cuba. In a country known for quashing dissent, thousands of Cubans took to the streets Sunday in a surge of protests not seen in nearly 30 years.
Shouting phrases like “freedom” and “the people are dying of hunger,” protesters overturned a police car in Cardenas, 90 miles east of Havana. Another video showed people looting from a government-run store — acts of open defiance in a nation with a long and effective history of repressive crackdowns on expressions of opposition.
The Sunday protests in Havana disrupted traffic
until police moved in after several hours and broke up the march when a few protesters threw rocks.
Cuba’s president, Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez, spoke out on national television Monday, calling the demonstrations a consequence of an underhanded campaign by Washington to exploit peoples’ “emotions” at a time when the island is facing food scarcity, power cuts and a growing number of COVID-19 deaths.
“We must make clear to our people that one can be dissatisfied, that’s legitimate, but we must be able to see clearly when we’re being manipulated,” DiazCanel said. “They want to change a system, to impose what type of government in Cuba?”
The demonstrations were unusual on an island where little dissent against
the government is tolerated. The last major public demonstration of discontent, over economic hardship, took place nearly 30 years in 1994. Last year, there were small demonstrations by artists and other groups, but nothing as big or widespread as what erupted this past weekend.
In the Havana protest Sunday, police initially trailed behind as protesters chanted, “Freedom!” “Enough!” and “Unite!” One motorcyclist pulled out a U.S. flag, but it was snatched from him by others.
Later, about 300 pro-government protesters arrived with a large Cuban flag, shouting slogans in favor of the late President Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution. Some assaulted an AP video journalist, smashing his camera. AP photojournalist Ramon Espinosa
was then beaten by a group of police officers in uniforms and civilian clothes; he suffered a broken nose and an eye injury.
Although many people tried to use cellphones to broadcast the protest live, Cuban authorities shut down internet service throughout the afternoon.
On Monday, Cuban authorities were blocking Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Telegram, said Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, a London-based internet monitoring firm. Twitter did not appear to be blocked, though Toker noted Cuba has the ability to cut it off if it wants to.
Biden’s comments represented something of a shift in tone from that of former President Barack Obama, who had emphasized sweeping aside decades of animosity between the two
countries and cutting loose “the shackles of the past.” Obama made restoring relations with Cuba a focal point of his foreign policy and significantly expanded ties between the two countries — a detente that the Trump administration quickly moved to strip away.
But the protests in Cuba on Sunday offered a rare moment of bipartisanship in the United States, with Democrats and Republicans alike speaking out in support of the demonstrations.
Others, however, blamed the American trade embargo for the protests and the deprivation driving them, a position the Cuban government took on Sunday when the demonstrations erupted.
“The truth is that if one wanted to help Cuba, the first thing that should be done is to suspend the blockade of Cuba as the majority of countries in the world are asking,” Mexico’s president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, told reporters Monday, saying it would be a humanitarian gesture.
But some Cuban activists in the United States, including those who oppose the embargo, were quick to challenge that narrative.
“There’s no food, there’s no medicine, there’s nothing, and this isn’t a product of the American embargo, which I do not support,” said Ramon Saul Sanchez, president of the Movimiento Democracia advocacy group in Miami. He noted that the embargo does allow Cuba to buy food from the United States, though restrictions on financing present significant barriers to the amount.The size of Sunday’s demonstrations, which played out across the country, stunned longtime Cuba analysts. It reflects how dire life in Cuba has become in recent months, as the pandemic deprives the island of vital tourism revenue and strains the health system, the electricity grid falters, and the prices of basic food staples like rice and beans soar.
“There are tremendously long lines to get into supermarkets,” which these days only accept dollars, said Katrin Hansing, an anthropologist at Baruch College in New York who spent much of the past year doing research in Havana. “The same can be said for medicine. There is nothing: There is no penicillin, there’s no antibiotics, there’s no aspirin. There’s nothing, really.”
On social media, videos of protesters decrying the lack of electricity and basic supplies circulated widely on Monday.
“I took to the streets because I’m tired of being hungry,” said Sara Naranjo, in a video shared on Twitter. “I don’t have water, I don’t have anything,” she said.