By: Andrea Rodriguez
Cuban police are out in force on the country’s streets as the president is accusing Cuban Americans of using social media to spur a rare outpouring of weekend protests over high prices and food shortages.
The demonstrations in several cities and towns were some of the biggest displays of antigovernment sentiment seen in years in tightly controlled Cuba, which is facing a surge of coronavirus cases as it struggles with its worst economic crisis in decades.
Many young people took part in Sunday’s demonstrations in Havana. Protests were also held elsewhere on the island, including in the small town of San Antonio de los Baños, where people objected to power outages and were visited by President Miguel Díaz-Canel. He entered a few homes, where he took questions from residents.
Authorities appeared determined to put a stop to the demonstrations. More than a dozen protesters were detained, including a leading Cuban dissident who was arrested trying to attend a march in the city of Santiago, 559 miles (900 kilometers) east. The demonstrators disrupted traffic in the capital for several hours until some threw rocks and police moved in and broke them up.
Internet service was spotty, possibly indicating an effort to prevent protesters from communicating with each other.
“We’ve seen how the campaign against Cuba was growing on social media in the past few weeks, “Díaz-Canel said Monday in a nationally televised appearance in which his entire Cabinet was present. “That’s the way it’s done: Try to create inconformity, dissatisfaction by manipulating emotions and feelings.”
In a statement Monday, President Joe Biden said Cuban protesters were asserting their basic rights.
“The Cuban people are demanding their freedom from an authoritarian regime. I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this protest in a long long time, if, quite frankly, ever,” Biden said in a brief exchange with reporters at the start of a meeting with mayors and law enforcement officials to discuss gun violence in the U.S.
“We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime. The U.S. urges the Cuban government to serve their people ’’rather than enriching themselves,” Biden added.
The comments marked a notable change in tone from Biden’s old boss, Barack Obama, who as president sought to ease decades of tensions between Washington and Havana while loosening U.S. imposed economic sanctions. It was an effort that was reversed by Trump, who partially rolled back Obama’s rapprochement, limiting U.S. travel to the island, banning American financial transactions with dozens of enterprises, and more.
Julie Chung, the acting assistant secretary for the department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, on Sunday suggested that the protests were driven by Cuban people exercising “their right to peaceful assembly to express concern about rising COVID case/deaths & medicine shortage. We commend the numerous efforts of the Cuban people mobilizing donations to help neighbors.”
But White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Monday sought to frame the protests being driven by far broader frustration, calling the demonstrations “spontaneous expressions of people who are exhausted with the Cuban government’s economic mismanagement and repression.”
Psaki added that the U.S. remains ready to assist Cuba in its COVID-19 vaccination effort, but the Cuban government’s decision not to participate in COVAX — a worldwide initiative aimed at distributing vaccines to poorer nations — complicated the effort.
U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq on Monday stressed the U.N. position “on the need for freedom of expression and peaceful assembly to be respected fully, and we expect that that will be the case.”
The demonstrations were extremely 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 on 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.
“We are fed up with the queues, the shortages. That’s why I’m here,” one middle-age protester told The Associated Press. He declined to identify himself for fear of being arrested later.
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 videojournalist, smashing his camera. AP photojournalist Ramón Espinosa was then beaten by a group of police officers in uniforms and civilian clothes; he suffered a broken nose and an eye injury.
The demonstration grew to a few thousand in the vicinity of Galeano Avenue and the marchers pressed on despite a few charges by police officers and tear gas barrages. People standing on many balconies along the central artery in the Centro Habana neighborhood applauded the protesters passing by. Others joined in the march.
About 2 1/2 hours into the march, some protesters pulled up cobblestones and threw them at police, at which point officers began arresting people and the marchers dispersed. AP journalists counted at least 20 people who were taken away in police cars or by individuals in civilian clothes.
Although many people tried to take out their cell phones and broadcast the protest live, Cuban authorities shut down internet service throughout the afternoon Sunday.
On Monday, Cuban authorities were blocking Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Telegram, said Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, a London-based internet monitoring firm.
Restricting internet access has become a tried-and-true method of stifling dissent by authoritarian regimes around the world, alongside government-supported disinformation campaigns and propaganda. On the extreme side, regimes like China and North Korea exert tight control over what regular citizens can access online. Elsewhere, service blockages are more limited, often cutting off common social platforms around elections and times of mass protests.
There was no formal organizer of Sunday’s protests; people found out about the rallying points over social media, mostly on Twitter and Facebook, the platforms most used by Cubans. The thousands of Cubans who took to the streets — protesters and pro-government activists alike — wielded smartphones to capture images and send them to relatives and friends or post them online.
While the recent easing of access by Cuban authorities to the internet has increased social media activity, Toker said, the level of censorship has also risen. Not only does the cutoff block out external voices, he said, it also squelches “the internal voice of the population who have wanted to speak out.”
Internet access in Cuba has been expensive and relatively rare until recently. The country was “basically offline” until 2008, then gradually entered a digital revolution, said Ted Henken, a Latin America expert at Baruch College, City University of New York. The biggest change, he noted, came in December 2018 when Cubans got access to mobile internet for the first time via data plans purchased from the state telecom monopoly. These days, more than half of all Cubans have internet access, Henken said.
Many Cubans now have real-time, anywhere-you-are access to the internet and the ability to share information among themselves, he added. Since early 2019, this access has facilitated regular, if smaller, events and protests on the island. In response, the government has periodically shut down access to social media, mostly to hide its repressive tactics from both citizens and foreigners, he said.
The Cuban government also restricts independent media in Cuba and “routinely blocks access within Cuba to many news websites and blogs,” according to Human Rights Watch.
Cuba is going through its worst economic crisis in decades, along with a resurgence of coronavirus cases, as it suffers the consequences of U.S. sanctions imposed by the Trump administration. The protests now, the largest in decades, are “absolutely and definitely fueled by increased access to internet and smart phones in Cuba,” said Sebastian Arcos, associate director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.
Social media posts from within and outside of Cuba are “not the root causes of the rebellion, but they are a factor in connecting the desperation, disaffection that exists in the island,” said Arturo López-Levy, an assistant political science professor at Holy Names University in California.
López-Levy, who grew up a few blocks from Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, said the country’s current leader has embraced the economic potential of digital technology far more than his predecessors, but may have calculated that a large segment of Cubans will accept a temporary internet shutdown if it helps restore order in the streets.
Elsewhere, government internet shutdowns after or ahead of protests have also become commonplace, whether for a few hours or extending for months. In Ethiopia, there was a three-week shutdown in July 2020 after civil unrest. The internet blackout in the Tigray region has stretched on for months. In Belarus, the internet went down for more than two days after an August 2020 election seen as rigged sparked mass protests. Mobile internet service repeatedly went down during weekend protests for months afterwards.
A decade ago during the Arab Spring, when social media was still in its early years and Egypt, Tunisia and other countries in the Middle East faced bloody uprisings that were broadcast on social media, headlines declared the movements “Twitter Revolutions” and experts debated about just how important a role social media played in the events. Ten years later, there is no question that social media and private chat platforms have become an essential organizing tool. Restricting them, in turn, is a routine move to suppress dissent. Internet service was disrupted in Cali, Colombia during May anti-government protests.
This year has also seen disruptions in Armenia, Uganda, Iran, Chad, Senegal and the Republic of Congo.
But authoritarian regimes aren’t the only ones getting into the act. India routinely shuts down the internet during times of unrest. Toker of NetBlocks said the imposition of internet restrictions in Cuba follows an emerging global pattern and not always in the countries you most expect them, such as a recent Nigerian cutoff of Twitter. On the plus side, he said, the world is much more aware of these incidents because it’s easier to monitor and report them remotely.
On Sunday, all of Cuba went offline for less than 30 minutes, after which there were several hours of intermittent but large outages, said Doug Madory of Kentik, a network management company. He said large internet outages were very rare in Cuba until very recently.
“There was an outage in January just for mobile service following the ‘27N’ protests,” Madory said, referring to a movement of Cuban artists, journalists and other members of civil society who marched on the Ministry of Culture on Nov. 27, 2020, demanding freedom and democracy.
Henken said he doesn’t believe the government would shut off access for an extended period of time, even though that is its go-to tactic for dissidents and activists.
“The problem they have now is that it’s not a handful of activists or artists or independent journalists — it’s now a massive swath of the population all throughout the country,” he said. “So the genie is out of the bottle. They’re trying to put it back in.”
(Source: AP – Contributing writers: Barbara Ortutay, Frank Bajak, Tali Aebel, Aamer Madhani & Jonathan Lemire)
