Abstract
[As did the April 2018 protests in Nicaragua described above, protests in Cuba on July 11, 2021, also raised questions regarding their origin and significance. Although time constraints prevented organizing an issue on the topic, we begin to address the current situation in Cuba with the two essays by Cubans below. We welcome additional submissions that respond to these analyses or offer additional perspectives on developments in Cuba—The Editors.]
The years between the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States in 2015 and the protests of July 11, 2021, witnessed the following significant events: the intensification of the U.S. imperial geopolitical blockade against Cuba during the Trump administration (2017–2021); the celebration of the Seventh Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (April 2016); the death of Fidel Castro (November 25, 2016); the election of Miguel Díaz-Canel as president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers (April 19, 2018); the transfer of power from the historical generation to a younger one when Díaz-Canel was elected president of the republic (October 10, 2019), replacing Raúl Castro; the writing of a new Constitution (April 2019); elections to the National Assembly (December 2019); the designation of Manuel Marrero Cruz as prime minister (a role that had been eliminated in 1976) on the president’s proposal; the impact of COVID-19 on the economy and the society; an attempt at restructuring the island’s economy, eliminating the convertible peso and leaving the Cuban peso as the single currency (January 2021); the production of five vaccines against COVID-19; and the Eighth Party Congress (April 2021), where President Díaz-Canel became first secretary, replacing Raúl Castro, who had retired.
The protests that flared up in various cities on the island on July 11, 2021, were not the first to take place in Cuba. The 1980 protests in Havana had led to the exodus of some 100,000 Cubans to the United States via the port of Mariel. Protests by the marginal sectors after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1994 had given rise to the “rafters’ crisis,” when anyone who wished to do so was allowed to travel to the United States by boat, raft, or any other means and the crisis ended with new migration agreements with the United States. The current protests were different from these in a number of ways. For one thing, they began in a town on the outskirts of Havana, San Antonio de los Baños, and from there spread to various cities throughout the island. President Díaz-Canel traveled to San Antonio de los Baños and spoke to the population and then made several television appearances in which he engaged in a significant amount of self-criticism and also accused Washington of promoting “a policy of economic suffocation to provoke social upheavals” in Cuba. At a July 14 roundtable on the causes of these events, he classified the protesters into four groups: those aspiring to reestablish U.S. hegemony in Cuba, malcontents, criminals, and young people. He also called for the unity of all Cubans and . . . respect on the part of all Cubans, stripping away any feelings of hatred, vulgarity, indecent behavior, but demanding discipline, the norms that guarantee social tranquility in our society. And we will see, later on, when we evaluate what this moment meant and what they sought to do to Cuba and to our people, how many lies, how much hatred, how much viciousness, how much evil was involved in all this.
On Sunday, July 18, in a great act of revolutionary reaffirmation, Díaz-Canel, accompanied by Raúl Castro, accused the Biden administration of giving in to the interests of the Cuban exile community in the United States and maintaining sanctions against the country. Biden had called Cuba a “failed state” and stood in solidarity with the protesters.
That these protests did not take place before July 11 while the population was suffering from the effects of the blockade—an economic crisis accentuated by the effects of the pandemic and the government’s mistakes regarding economic strategy—was due to the great achievements of the Revolution and the revolutionary consciousness of the people. They were triggered by a social media campaign and the coercive measures of the blockade; the social deterioration of impoverished neighborhoods; the enormous difficulty of obtaining food, which the government had been unable to resolve; the almost total lack of essential medicines; the frequent power and water outages in the summer heat; an inefficient communications strategy; the perception that the government might not be managing the pandemic as efficiently as initially appeared, given the exponential rise in infections and deaths during the past two months, especially in Matanzas; 1 the social tension that had accumulated after months of confinement, on the one hand, and the long lines for obtaining insufficient and expensive food, on the other, which fueled frustration and irritation among the population; and the government’s tendency to exclude, minimize, and ignore alternative proposals and maintain a model of centralized planning closer to the collapsed Soviet system than to the kind of successful socialism developed in China, Vietnam, and even Laos (Alzugaray, 2021b). In 2010, Fidel Castro had said that “the model doesn’t even work for us,” and his brother had warned that “we must either change or sink.” However, bureaucratic inertia had precluded the few reforms proposed during the Sixth Party Congress in 2011.
The economist Julio Carranza (2021b) has explained the protests in terms of an economy that, for whatever reason, including the genocidal blockade and the current impact of the pandemic, as well as internal inadequacies and paralysis, does not respond sufficiently to its needs for employment, consumption, or its inclusion. Nor does the political system provide enough space for representation and real participation, let alone the reasonable and necessary degree of autonomy in the management of its own organizations and spaces. Some people live in neighborhoods that, although they have access to education, health, etc., are awash in unresolved problems—precarious housing, poorly treated waste and water, coexistence with marginal sectors, diverse needs, etc.
To this he says we must add “behaviors coming from sectors related to prestigious historical families or with governmental responsibilities that do not always set the best example” during a time when the exercise of extreme austerity is essential on the part of leaders and their immediate circles.
In other words, and although what happened was the result of an operation managed from abroad and through the island’s social networks as a consequence of the blockade, it was also nurtured by important endogenous factors: increased social inequality and deterioration, especially in the slums, a food and medicine crisis, an inffectively controlled pandemic, and poor governmental communications. In short, while tied to U.S. aggression the demonstrations also reflected internal, economic, social, and political problems that were the consequence of governmental and party mistakes in the construction of Cuban socialism. Economists such as Carranza (2021a) and Triana (2021), political scientists such as Ramonet (2021), Alzugaray (2021a), Guanche (2021), Hérnández (2021), and Borón (2021), and novelists such as Padura (2021) largely agree on the diagnosis. Although they do not always agree on the analysis and the measures that should be adopted, they see the protests as an attempt by the Miami exiles, the island’s own dissidents, and the U.S. government to destabilize the country.
What is New
These protests were unlike the earlier ones in the following ways: More than 30 years have passed since the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Cuba now has two new generations that have not experienced the great achievements and victories of the Revolution—that have known only scarcity and material difficulties. They do not have an emotional bond with the highlands or the plains, the clandestine struggles in the cities and the guerrilla fight in the mountains, the clashes with bandits, the literacy campaign, the victory at Playa Girón, the military victories in Angola and Ethiopia, the Battle of Ideas, or the return of Elián González. They have not experienced the injustices of capitalism—only the inequalities that socialism has not yet been able to eliminate and that have increased since the 1990s. It is no accident that, like the protests of 1994, those of 2021 erupted in areas of concentrated poverty.
A charismatic Fidel Castro had managed to neutralize the previous protests with adequate measures and great speed. The current outbreak happened less than three months after his brother Raúl retired.
While the protests of 1980 and 1994 took place only in Havana, these began in a small town and radiated to cities across the island as well as Havana neighborhoods.
After the 1994 protests, the island improved rapidly thanks to economic reform, the establishment of relations with Chávez’s Venezuela in 1999, and the emergence of post-neoliberal governments in the region between 1999 and 2015 (with the minister for the economy announcing in 2006 that the Special Period had ended). Now there is no quick recovery in sight—at least not until the pandemic is brought under control and eradicated.
The blockade had never been as intense as it was under the Trump administration’s 243 measures, which Biden had failed to modify. 2
The delay in the implementation of the measures approved in the Guidelines and the Seventh and Eighth Party Congresses had left many with the impression that there would be no serious changes to improve living standards. 3
The COVID-19 pandemic had dealt a severe blow to the Cuban economy by significantly reducing tourism and remittances, already reduced by Trump’s measures and the obstacles that overseas Cubans and tourists face when traveling to the island bringing foreign currency.
Venezuela’s economic crisis (also linked to U.S. harassment) also affected its trade relations with Cuba.
Given the economic crisis, the government took perhaps necessary but unpopular measures in 2021 that were not discussed with the masses and gave rise to harsh popular criticism, leading to rectifications. The use of a magnetic card to buy products in dollars or other currencies meant that those who did not have dollars (or relatives abroad providing remittances) were excluded from a consumer’s market providing basic necessities in stores limited to freely convertible currency. After the elimination of that currency, many were adversely affected when converting it into Cuban pesos or dollars. The decree requiring all dollars to be deposited in the state bank in June 2021 and then transferred to magnetic cards for purchases in convertible-currency stores led to popular unrest. When the government moved on to dollarization it discovered that Cuba could not be managed in dollars because of the blockade, and the idea of reconsidering dollarization was bewildering for both state enterprises and the general population.
In contrast to the protests of 1980 and 1994, most of these protests were not spontaneous: they were instigated by the United States, from abroad, and, coordinated via social networks, also from within the island. Social networks now played a key role. (That said, there were also people who demonstrated in the streets and on social networks spontaneously.) The protests involved mostly young people and people from the most impoverished areas, those suffering most from social problems and inequality. Stagnation and even regression have affected the vulnerable class sectors for the past three decades. Racial equality, one of basic principles of the Revolution, is a key factor here; not only was there a reduction in the gross domestic product per capita, but hopes, promises, and aspirations were dashed by the crushing difficulties of daily life. The demonstrators included representatives of the lumpenproletariat, revolutionaries confused and frustrated by governmental mistakes, the pandemic, and the consequences of the blockade, and citizens from various sectors and social strata who did not believe in the socialist project, saw it as incapable of developing the country, and doubted that the slogan “democratic, prosperous, and sustainable” was being realized.
Although these protests took place in several cities on the island, they did not involve a national majority. A large percentage of the population continues to support the Revolution.
The protests began peacefully but degenerated into violence and vandalism that destroyed social property, overturned two police cars, assaulted police, and forced law enforcement officers to arrest violent demonstrators. There was only one casualty, but hundreds of people were arrested. The government delayed reporting how many protests there were and how many people were arrested.
In 1980 and 1994, the media attack on Cuba was not comparable in magnitude because, this time around, the theories of Gene Sharp and others regarding nonviolent revolution, the soft coup, and the so-called color revolutions came into play. The global right and broad sectors of the Cuban community abroad, especially in Miami, have combined to misrepresent the events, employing hate speech (as the social media and fake news have done) and condemning the Cuban government. This is meant to, among other things, reduce Cuba’s attractiveness to tourists and push the U.S. government toward military aggression.
Whereas in 1980 and 1994 mass exodus to the United States was possible, this is not the case now. The U.S. authorities have made it clear that they will not allow it.
In contrast to the earlier protests, these were preceded by conflicts with the Revolution on the part of the intelligentsia. On December 5, 2020, following protests of the censorship of artistic expression by the artists and intellectuals of the San Isidro Movement and the November 27 Movement, the current president of the Casa de las Americas and former minister of culture Abel Prieto met with young intellectuals in an event organized by the Ministry of Culture and said, “The counterrevolution has sneaked into the fabric of the culture.”
Conclusions
The photos and videos circulating in the media (e.g., BBC Mundo and others), which are very critical of the “Cuban regime,” show that neither the National Revolutionary Police nor the special troops of the Ministry of the Interior nor any other law enforcement agents deployed disproportionate force as has often been the case in demonstrations in Colombia, Chile, France, Japan, or the United States. The current situation requires the implementation of changes already approved, along with others that have been recommended by economists and political scientists. Above all, it requires a package of urgent measures to alleviate citizens’ difficulties. All investment in hotel construction and other projects, except for essential ones, should be halted, and measures such as the one recently approved exempting visitors to Cuba from customs payments on food, hygiene products, and medicine should be implemented. Price caps for agricultural products have been eliminated to allow supply and demand to regulate costs. Garage sales were approved on July 20, and on August 6 the Council of State finally approved the decree/law on micro-, small, and medium-sized enterprises. 4
The Cuban Revolution, as Carranza (2021b) has pointed out, “has to make a new pact with each generation. We cannot transfer the same pact in terms of expectations and spaces from one generation to another. Only the principles are permanent: national sovereignty, social justice, and economic and democratic development. Everything else is subject to debate, change, progress, openness.” According to Hérnández (2021), the protests have shown the Party apparatus, once again, that the effectiveness of a public media system is not ideological but political, and that is measured by its credibility and ability to convince (the unconvinced, of course). They have confirmed that law enforcement can provide first aid during violent outbreaks, but at the cost of other kinds of damage, and that it is not they who should be dealing with the social and political problems that lead to dissidence. Finally, they have shown U.S. politicians that their alliance with this bellicose opposition reinforces hard-line policy on both sides and damages the actual exercise of freedom and human rights in Cuba.
Speaking at the roundtable held at the Palace of the Revolution on July 14, during which the events of July 11 were analyzed, and again in his speech during the reaffirmation ceremony of July 18 on the Malecón, President Díaz-Canel (2021a; 2021b) expressed firmness in the face of aggression but also acknowledged his mistakes and the diversity expressed in the protests, making an effort to distinguish between antinational, manipulated motivations and legitimate ones, those expressing genuine discontent. Ideally this will translate into a political response on a par with the moment. Among other measures, nolle prosequi could be applied to the cases of those who, while involved in the protests, did not commit violent acts, and an amnesty could be decreed for those convicted of such acts.
Footnotes
Notes
Francisco López Segrera is a Cuban historian and an associate professor at the Higher Institute of International Relations in Havana. He is also a consultant with the Global University Network for Innovation, the Catalan Association of Public Universities, and the Center for Strategic Thinking and Foresight of the Universidad Externado de Colombia. In 2012 he was a Latin American Perspectives Fellow. Mariana Ortega-Breña is a translator based in Mexico City.