On Sunday 11 July, anti-government protests took place simultaneously in dozens of locations throughout Cuba. In several places, including San Antonio on the outskirts of Havana, and in Matanzas, where Covid-19 cases have surged, protests turned violent, with windows smashed, shops looted, cars overturned, rocks thrown and people assaulted. Many of those involved were venting frustration at their daily difficulties, resulting from shortages of basic goods and the restrictions imposed in the context of Covid-19. However, behind these seemingly spontaneous outbursts lies a lucratively funded, long-run US strategy to foster opposition to the Cuban government. HELEN YAFFE reports from Havana.
This was the first social disturbance in Cuba for 27 years. In most of the Americas, including the US, violent social disturbances are common, involving serious casualties, and numerous detentions. Rarely does the western media report on the systematic killings of trade unionists and community activists in Colombia, the rubber bullets fired at the eyes of young protestors in Chile or police murders in Brazil’s sprawling slums. The protests in Cuba, however, immediately made news headlines around the world.
The international media, politicians, and commentators, including many supposedly on the left, exaggerated and manipulated the events to depict mass opposition to the Cuban government, police repression of peaceful protests and a regime in crisis. They hoped this was the spark for which they have waited so long, presaging the collapse of Cuba’s socialist state. The role of external forces, the existence of a concerted social media war on Cuba, the pernicious impact of US sanctions, and the mobilisation of thousands of Cubans in support of the revolutionary government, have been underplayed or ignored.
In Miami, the Mayor called for airstrikes against Cuba; there were attempts to organise a naval flotilla, which would provoke a confrontation in Cuban waters, and there were calls for humanitarian (read military) intervention. US President Biden, whose own presidency was threatened by right-wing revolt, described Cuba as a ‘failed state’.
The ‘two-track’ policy to defeat Cuban socialism
The US blockade of Cuba is the longest and most extensive system of unilateral sanctions applied against any country in modern history. Not only are sanctions a violation of human rights, contrived to obstruct Cuban development, they are also a key instrument in the US toolkit to pursue regime change.
This objective was clearly laid out in the secret memorandum written by Lester Mallory, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, on 6 April 1960. Recognising that ‘the majority of Cubans support Castro’ and ‘there is no effective political opposition’, Mallory proposed measures to ‘weaken the economic life of Cuba...to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.’ This is the two-track policy; economic asphyxiation to foster internal opposition. The human rights of the Cuban population were not on the radar. Nor are they today.
61 years later, at the UN General Assembly on 23 June, when 184 countries supported Cuba’s motion for the end of the US blockade, the US representative, Rodney Hunter, demonstrated that this policy persists. He described sanctions as ‘a legitimate way to achieve foreign policy, national security and other national and international objectives’ and explained that they were ‘one set of tools in our broader effort towards Cuba’.
Imposing the economic conditions for social unrest
The maleconazo was a violent protest in Havana in 1994, the worst year of the so-called ‘Special Period’ of economic crisis which saw Cuba’s GDP fall by 35% after nearly 90% of the island’s trade was swept away with the socialist bloc. While scarce resources were harnessed to prioritise welfare, Cubans faced shortages in every sector: food, fuel, medicines, housing, industry, transport, and so on. Life was tough.
Betting on the collapse of Cuban socialism, the US approved the Torricelli Act of 1992 and the Helms-Burton Act of 1996 to obstruct Cuba’s trade and financial relations with the rest of the world. This was in the heyday of neoliberal globalisation when Cuba was obliged to reintegrate into capitalist world markets. Meanwhile, more sophisticated ‘regime change’ programmes were developed, from US President Clinton’s ‘People to People’ programmes, to President Bush’s Plan for a Free Cuba, and Obama’s ‘civil society engagement’. In 2006, the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba recommended $80m be channelled into US programmes over the following two years to boost Cuban ‘civil society’ and plan for a post-Castro transition to capitalism, followed by $20m to be spent annually ‘until the dictatorship ceases to exist’. This ‘investment’ continues: the US Congress approves $20m annually for covert ‘democracy promotion programmes’. It is a lucrative business that spawns many vested interests.
The Cuban Revolution survived the Special Period and established beneficial relations with Venezuela and other countries in Latin America. Cuba was a founding member of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, a trade and cooperation treaty in Latin American and the Caribbean based on participants’ resource strengths and socioeconomic needs. The Cuban economy recovered with major developments in tourism, organic agriculture, biotechnology, medical internationalism, energy programmes and other areas. Responding to internal and external pressures, Obama opted for a tentative rapprochement in December 2014, but US sanctions, applied extraterritorially, and funding for regime change programmes continued.
Trump’s maximum pressure policy
The Trump administration reversed rapprochement, tightening the US blockade to unprecedented levels. 243 new coercive measures and sanctions were imposed to sever Cuba’s trade with the world, fine ships carrying fuel and other goods to Cuba, scare away foreign investors, block remittances and family visits, and prevent Cuba’s access to the international financial system. Nearly 90% of international transactions involve US dollars, giving the US immense power over global trade.
Over 50 of those coercive measures were taken since the pandemic began, severely affecting Cuba’s capacity to import medical ventilators, spare parts, syringes, medicines and their raw materials, food and fuel. Even international donations of medical supplies to Cuba are obstructed. This creates a bitter contradiction: thousands of Cuban medical specialists have treated Covid-19 patients in 40 countries and the island has the only domestically developed Covid-19 vaccines in Latin America, yet Cubans cannot import the syringes required for their mass vaccination programme or ventilators for their ICU units.
As a direct result of sanctions, from 2019, shortages returned to Cuba. From March 2020, austerity was compounded by the pandemic. Cuba’s GDP fell by 11% in 2020; tourism fell 75% as borders were closed, and imports fell 30% compared to 2019, hence the unfilled shelves and long queues. The Cuban government has harnessed its control over production and distribution to provide equal allocations of scarce goods, so people do not starve. But once again, life is tough.
Social media war on Cuba
In 2009, under Obama, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) initiated a programme to spark a youth movement against the Cuban government by cultivating and promoting local hip-hop artists. Grayzone journalist Max Blumenthal records that, ‘In recent years in Cuba, Washington’s regime change specialists have homed in on Afro-Cubans and marginalised youth, harnessing culture to turn social resentment into counter-revolutionary action.’* He tracks the links between lucrative US-funding for regime change programmes and the elevation of Cuban rappers and artists who align themselves with US imperialism. They are indulged by US diplomats in Cuba, powerful politicians in the US, neoliberal thinktanks and international NGOs. They have also gained followers among the western left, Blumenthal shows.
In 2018, Trump set up an ‘Internet Task Force’ to promote ‘the free and unregulated flow of information’ to Cuba, just as the country expanded facilities enabling Cubans to access the internet via their mobile phones. A social media campaign was orchestrated from Miami, oiled with millions of US Congress-approved dollars. It blames the Cuban government for the hardships the population faces, dismisses US sanctions as an excuse or a lie and seeks to channel frustration into political opposition.
Since late 2020, Miami-based social media ‘influencers’ and YouTubers have urged Cubans to take to the streets. Some have even offered money, or phone credit, to anyone who carries out, films and uploads acts of violent disorder and arson.
At an international press conference on Tuesday 13 July, two days after the protests, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez presented evidence of a new media campaign. On 15 June, the hashtag #SOSCuba was launched by a US company, the same day it was authorised to receive Florida state funding; on 5 July, hashtags appeared calling for a ‘humanitarian corridor’ in Cuba; bots and troll farms used to disseminate messages on Twitter through false accounts, one doing five retweets per second on 10 and 11 July; Twitter users changed their geolocation to appear to be in Cuba.
Cuban media has worked to expose the media manipulation of the protests and the aftermath: The New York Times published photos of government supporters in the streets, describing them as opposition activists. UN Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet did the same. The hypocrisy of this ‘outcry’ was highlighted by US journalist Dan Cohen who tweeted: ‘Colombian Vice President, whose police forces have murdered 75 protesters in less than 3 months, urges Cuba (where one protester was killed in clashes with police) to “respect the right of protest”.’
Photos of protests in Egypt, sports celebrations in Argentina, looting in South Africa, and police repression of Catalan independence activists in Spain have all been presented as showing the Cuban protests of 11 July. Social media is rife with baseless accusations of mass disappearances, systemic torture and missing children. A video claiming to show Cuban police shooting a man at his home was exposed by Cuban media which showed footage of him walking calmly to the police car in handcuffs and then interviewed back at his home in good health three days later. The daily efforts by Cuban media and officials to expose these lies and their sources rarely makes the news outside the island.
The Trump sanctions and the social media war are the contemporary versions of the ‘two-track’ policy pursued by the US for over 60 years.
11 July protests
The protests erupted on 11 July, after a leader of the ‘artist’ San Isidro opposition movement issued a call to take to the streets of Havana. In San Antonio, the population had suffered electricity blackouts over the previous days, so tensions were high.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz Canel responded to events on Sunday 11 July similarly to Fidel Castro during the maleconazo in 1994. He went to San Antonio to speak to local people directly, recognising their legitimate frustrations, and then led a march through the community. He then appeared on television to inform the public about the events, acknowledging Cubans’ daily difficulties and giving a fervent denunciation of US imperialism and the social media campaign. He declared ‘the streets belong to the revolutionaries!’ At that signal, thousands of Cubans mobilised in towns and cities around the country to defend Cuban socialism.
Over the following days, there was a tense calm, with one violent protest in Arroyo Naranjo, on the outskirts of Havana, in which one person died, and more sustained injuries, including police. Small skirmishes took place over the following days. Internet access was temporarily suspended, presumably to prevent social media being used to coordinate more protests. Car radios and workplace televisions were tuned into a four-hour broadcast by the President and government ministers who discussed the events, analysed the country’s situation, and denounced US intervention.
On Saturday 17 July, rallies took place around the country in defence of Cuban socialism and to demand an end to the US blockade. Diaz Canel spoke at a rally of 200,000 on the Malecon in Havana.
Cuban authorities have made clear that violent disorder will be punished through the legal system. There may be more conflict ahead, but as the lines are drawn, no-one should underestimate the resilience of the Cuban Revolution.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 283, August/September 2021
* See ‘Cuba’s cultural counter-revolution: US gov’t-backed rappers, artists gain fame as “catalyst for current unrest”’, The Grayzone, 25 July 2021. https://tinyurl.com/w7wm3t66