Food, Current and Freedom: Civil Protest Rekindles in Cuba

Maritza Gonzalez’s two young children have long known what it is to sleep until morning. In her home in Morón, in the Cuban province of Ciego de Ávila, Maritza brushes away mosquitoes, fanning them with pieces of cardboard, but her two young children have trouble closing their eyes. “They can’t sleep because the power goes out every three or four hours,” he says. And if there is no electricity, you can’t even connect a fan or air conditioning. “You have to blow air into them with a piece of cardboard, and you’re a man, too, and you get tired of being in this all day.” For several weeks now, the Cuban Electrical Union has been reporting continuous cuts to electricity service on the island, which has added to the food crisis in the country, on Sunday, March 17, a massive protest, which once again forced. In the investigation of the government of Miguel Diaz-Canel.

The street activity, which started around two o’clock in the afternoon in the neighborhood of the city of Santiago de Cuba, escalated by Sunday night in other provinces of the country such as Matanzas or Artemisa. If the first demands were for “present” and “food”, the protesters shouted “freedom” and shouted directly at the current president. The government shut down the Internet to prevent the events from spreading to other parts of the country, but some people managed to share images where hundreds chanted the phrase “motherland and life” in chorus, which has become a national anthem. of opposition.

Although other demonstrations of discontent have been reported on the island, it is the largest since July 11 and 12, 2021, when thousands of Cubans took to the streets for similar reasons.

Despite government warnings against earlier protests, for which some have paid with prison terms of up to 20 years, economic conditions have once again driven Cubans into the streets. The 18-hour long blackout is reminiscent of those experienced in the 1990s during the so-called special period, after the loss of aid to the former Soviet Union. Now, fuel shipments from allied countries such as Russia or Venezuela are affected, and the country’s main Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant is also experiencing frequent breakdowns.

From Santiago de Cuba, a neighbor who asked to remain anonymous confirmed that the blackout continues, and that no food has arrived in his warehouse for at least a month. Although a popular uprising broke out near his home a week ago, he says the city is back to normal. To quell the protests, the government sent products like rice and sugar to some very local warehouses. He also deployed his police and military forces to quell the demonstrations.

Diaz-Canel accused the US of “heating the streets of Cuba”.

The first secretary of the Communist Party in Santiago de Cuba, Beatriz Johnson Urrutia, sent to quell the popular uprising, announced an immediate shipment of food to certain warehouses in the city. “We cannot deny that it was a very tense situation,” he said later in an official press appearance. “But as always, people understood.”

At the time the protests were taking place, Governor Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged listening to the people’s grievances.

Speeches from the president, the Cuban foreign ministry or the state press have been the same: blaming the opposition on perceived interference from the United States. Diaz-Canel blamed South Florida’s “moderate politicians and terrorists” for “heating up the streets of Cuba,” a claim that State Department chief deputy spokesman Vedant Patel quickly denied. “The United States is not behind the protests in Cuba and that accusation is absurd,” he said in an official statement. “Yesterday protests in several Cuban cities demanded electricity, food and basic freedoms. “I think what we are seeing is a reflection of the dire situation on the island,” he added.

There is no clarity on the number of detainees

Almost three years after the July 11 and 12 protests, the first of that magnitude in the country since the revolution came to power, the demands remain the same: the general state of uncertainty the country is experiencing.

Camila Rodríguez, coordinator of the Justicia 11J group, which monitors the situation of thousands of political prisoners left behind by previous protests, confirms that there were dozens of detainees during Sunday’s demonstrations, but it has only been possible to confirm the identities of five. People, two on display in Bayamo, two in El Cobre and one in Matanzas. At least three of those detained so far have been released, two of them after paying fines for alleged offenses of “public disorder”.

However, Raudiel Pena, a lawyer for Cubelex, thinks that “it is very possible that the government will again resort to the same practices after July 11,” such as charging sedition crimes against some of the people who have been detained. moment “We cannot rule out that this happens because of the way the Cuban state criminalizes protest,” he says.

As with the July protests, the government resorted to continued internet blackouts and police and military deployments, and although there are several videos showing police cracking down on protesters, these protests have been less violent than previous protests. “We must also understand that these protests were not as widespread across the country as on July 11, although there is evidence of beatings of protesters, police intervention and militarization,” says Pena.

Because of the government’s historic crackdown on protesters on the island, it has been difficult for Cubans to go out and occupy public spaces for years. A survey by the independent CubaData Project shows that one in two Cuban citizens intend to participate in protests, but few join demonstrations. In the country, discontent only grows, as the situation has worsened over the past at least five years and no short-term solution is in sight.

2023 in Cuba was marked by shortages of food, medicine, and fuel, which affected transportation and caused several blackouts during the year. The economy shrank by 2%, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, the collapse of the tourism sector, the United States’ economic embargo on the island, inefficient government management and many missteps.

Since then a series of decisions have been made at the government level, some of which indicate that the country’s leadership is not at its best: not only did they implement a package of economic measures that increased the cost of living of the Cuban family, but they had to stop these measures at the beginning of 2024, and , without anyone suspecting, they announced the swift dismissal of the then Economy Minister, Alejandro Gil Fernández, who was later found to be under investigation for corruption offences.

Several times the Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, has recognized the fuel shortage in the country and said the government will have a solution. Amid the continuing inconvenience caused by the lack of electricity in Cuba, the minister said that “the fuel situation will be better in the future,” but Cuban economist Omar Everleni Pérez Villanueva, former director of the Center for Studies of Cuban Economy at the University of Havana, told EL PAÍS that he believed that 2024 The year will be worse than the year.

“January, February and March have been terrible. These are months in which there is not only lack of electricity, but also scarcity of water, scarcity of food. “The situation in the country is really very complicated.” Everleny asserts that the current blackout on the island is compounded not only by food shortages, but also by non-compliance with delivery cycles in the country’s warehouses. “There are provinces like Eastern, where products have not been delivered for a month. I don’t think there is a short-term solution. There’s no fuel because there’s no money to pay for the ships, and money has to be generated to get that, and I don’t think there are enough imports to make up that shortfall in the short term.”

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