Cuban leader says on YouTube that protesters were not anti-government
After hundreds of Cubans took to the streets this month calling for food, electricity and freedom, Cuban leader Miguel DíazCanel deniedthat they were protesting his government, again blaming the United States during a new YouTube show he says he will be hosting regularly because people need better “communication.”
The online show, “From the Presidency,” is the latest in a genre adopted by populist and authoritarian leaders worldwide who claim to be best suited to communicate directly with their publics. But DíazCanel lacks the charisma of the late Fidel Castro, and his effort to spin a positive narrative on the recent protests exposes the limits of an old-fashioned propaganda system in the era of social media.
The show is similar to one the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez hosted named “Aló Presidente” — dreaded by many Venezuelans because it dragged on for hours — although the Cuban version is shorter and the title less catchy. The Cuban version’s first episode, released Friday, followed a similar script of government propaganda and attacks on opponents, centered on the government’s determination to blame the protests in Santiago de Cuba and a few other cities on U.S. sanctions.
“As long as there is a blockade and as long as Cuba is included in a list of countries that supposedly support terrorism, we have all the sovereign right to blame the United States government,” Díaz-Canel said.
In another sign of the escalation of tensions in the relationship with the U.S., Cuba’s vice minister of foreign ffairs, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, who frequently meets with his American counterparts as the top diplomat working on U.S. affairs, called the U.S. Embassy in Havana “a sewer” in a post on X.
The renewed tensions revolve around the protests that erupted in Santiago de Cuba and Bayamo, two cities in eastern Cuba, and Santa Marta, near the seaside resort of Varadero, on March 17, amid widespread shortages of food, medicines and oil.
The island’s economy never fully recovered from the end of subsidies after the collapse of the Soviet Union. After the country plunged into a severe economic crisis known as the Special Period, some market reforms and new subsidies from Chávez’s Venezuela kept the economy afloat.
However, mismanagement and botched policies have ruined the island’s agriculture, and hardliners in government have blocked further market reforms to expand an emergent private sector. The COVID-19 pandemic and U.S. financial sanctions have further limited the government’s access to foreign currency through remittances and tourism.
But economists agree that Cuba’s problem is simple: The centrally planned Marxist economy does not work.
Díaz-Canel, the appointed president and head of the Communist Party who ordered a crackdown on islandwide protests in July 2021, struggled to control the narrative of the March demonstrations during the 1-hour 11-minute show, at times acknowledging that the deonstrations were expressions of popular discontent, at other times calling the protests “an exercise in socialist democracy” — and then denying there were protests at all.
He said that the people who took to the streets were “upset” because of lengthy power blackouts, food shortages and problems in the distribution of food rations. But that didn’t amount to antigovernment protests, he contended.
Instead, he said, the people were merely seeking a government answer to their complaints. And authorities promptly responded by showing up and explaining “the circumstance that we all know and that has to do above all with the worsening of the blockade in the last four years.”