Cuba

A massive protest movement broke out in Cuba on July 11, 2021. Food, medicine, and electricity shortages exacerbated by the COVID pandemic were pushing an already desperate, oppressed, and impoverished nation to the brink of rebellion.

Demonstrators used the internet—which has only been legally available in the country since 2018—to coordinate action in large and small cities across the island.

“Freedom…I felt free. I have never experienced in my life something so spectacular and wonderful. You had to have lived it to understand,” one Cuban citizen, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution from the Cuban government, told Reason. 

One Sunday last summer, 18-year-old Eloy Cardoso left his mother’s house on the outskirts of Havana to collect an Atari game console from a friend.

He’d stayed at home the previous day, while the largest anti-government demonstrations since the revolution had ripped through Cuba.

The authorities had managed to quell the protests in most of the country overnight, but not in La Güinera: unrest was still raging in the humble and normally calm neighbourhood, and Eloy walked out into a bloody brawl.

Cuban authorities have snuffed out protests planned by activists to call for nationwide demonstrations for democracy and more freedom of expression.

After being caught off guard by unprecedented protests in July, the government acted in advance to ban the demonstrations planned for Monday, ran a media campaign arguing it was a US attempt at regime change, and placed protest leaders under house arrest.

Edel Pérez, 35, a television actor arrested in the July protests, was prevented from leaving his house by two plain-clothed state security agents. “I feel impotent and angry,” he said. “They are violating my constitutional rights.”

“Elections? What for?”
— Fidel Castro, January 1960

“The United States stands with the brave Cubans who have taken to the streets to oppose 62 years of repression under a communist regime.”
— President Biden, July 22, 2021

Take a look at the opening quotes to this essay, pause, and think about them. There is a long litany of American miscalculations, cowardice, gamesmanship, indifference, condescension, and exploitation centered on Cuba, the Cuban people, and Cuban-Americans. It has been a bipartisan problem for decades, with a lot of American political rhetoric; one double-crossed, failed invasion attempt; and brutal communist intransigence.

Thousands of anti-Cuban regime protesters gathered outside the White House Sunday and stayed overnight into Monday to pressure Joe Biden to do more to address socialist Miguel Díaz-Canel’s actions against the people of Cuba.

The group stayed into the night for a planned candlelight vigil at midnight to mark the 26th of July Movement, a Cuban national holiday commemorating the 1953 attack when Fidel Castro led his first attempt to overthrow then-Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.

‘I’m 27 and I never thought I would live to see something like this,’ Alex Perez, a Florida resident who came to the United States from Cuba seven years ago, told the Miami Herald as he joined the protest in Washington,D.C.

Sunday July 11. Demonstrations erupt in the main cities of Cuba. Tens of thousands of people take to the streets. They know they risk being brutally arrested, sent to jail, possibly tortured and killed by the police. They reject the communist dictatorship that has oppressed them for 62 years. They shout “Libertad”: freedom. They hold up Cuban and American flags — once again, the symbol of people who yearn to breathe freely.

Those who dream of communism for the Western world first kept silent, then, while making a few criticisms of the dictatorship in Cuba, blamed it on an American embargo. They failed to point out that if the Cuban dictators cannot trade with the United States, they still can trade with the rest of the world; and also failed to point out that Cuba has nothing to sell: its leaders have destroyed the country’s economy.

Governments in Western Europe have made no comment to date; they seem to prefer avoiding the subject.

On Sunday, July 11th, the world took note of a historic event in Cuba, as thousands of citizens took to the streets to protest against the government. Many shouted “Patria y Vida!”—Fatherland and Life—the title of a banned but extremely popular rap song that riffs on a slogan coined by the late Fidel Castro: “Fatherland or Death.” Many also shouted “Libertad!”—Freedom—and similar phrases that are not only heretical but, when shouted in protest, illegal in Cuba, where the Communist Party is the sole legal arbiter of political life.

Nothing better illustrates the utter bankruptcy of communist ideology than Cuba’s basket case economy, which has resulted in the country suffering its largest wave of anti-government protests in at least three decades.

To date, at least one protester has been killed and hundreds more detained, as the communist regime founded by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro has responded with characteristic brutality to the outpouring of nationwide dissent.