The Cuban government sends rice and milk to quell the protests, but discontent continues

The capital of Santiago de Cuba woke up “calm”. This is what some residents of Santiago said in a conversation with EL PAÍS, after the Cuban government suppressed the large protests that started on Carrera del Morro avenue and multiplied in several provinces of the country. To the hundreds of people who cried “hunger”, the government responded by sending trucks with food to warehouses located on Carretera del Moro and the Gasometro. The First Secretary of the Communist Party in that province, Beatriz Johnson Urrutia, said they would immediately deliver rice and sugar to the population.

“Those supposed trucks do not mean they will start selling rice, sugar or milk to the population. They are now just distributing the rice and sugar for the month that didn’t come, the milk for the babies that they didn’t give,” says a Cuban resident in Santiago de Cuba who asked to remain anonymous. Otherwise, he says, everything is quiet. “Everything here. It’s quiet as usual,” he says. “They knocked down the stream last night and, with darkness in the streets, had no choice but to gather.” He also says that the city will be guarded this Monday by several police patrols and state security agents. has come

Although the protests seem to have subsided in the capital of Santiago de Cuba, some videos on social networks show that this Monday residents of the city of El Cobre in Santiago de Cuba came to the police headquarters shouting “freedom” and demanding. Release of those arrested on Sunday. A source told EL PAÍS that the towns of La Coloma and El Cayuco also took to the streets this Monday. Due to constant mobile data outages and difficult internet access, it is impossible to verify or record events from the island.

Military deployments and arrests due to discontent

By the early hours of March 18, replicas of street protests were recorded in many municipalities across the country. In Bayamo, one of the cities with the most historical weight, where the national anthem was born and whose residents set fires in resistance to Spanish occupation, Cubans came out singing the national anthem and the government responded with repression. Some videos show police officers beating civilians who were running to avoid arrest, and Special Forces (Black Wasps) troops were deployed to quell the demonstrations.

Around midnight on Sunday, the city of Cárdenas, in the west of the island, had already joined the protests, banging pots and pans and in the middle of a blackout that lasted several hours. Some young people and mothers with children in their arms walked through the Santa Marta neighborhood while also walking the streets of Alquizar and San Antonio de los Baños. Outside the country, Cuban exiles demonstrated together from the legendary Versailles restaurant in Miami to the headquarters of the Cuban Embassy in Montevideo, Uruguay.

The day commemorates the historic protests of July 11 and 12, 2021 across Cuba, where thousands of Cubans took to the streets, the first of its magnitude since the victory of the revolution.

As happened three years earlier, the Cuban government resorted to police repression to quell the protests. Organizations that independently record the number of detainees in Cuba have found it difficult to document all arrests. The groups Cubelex and Justicia 11 were able to confirm the identities of at least four people who were “violently” detained, some of them with unknown whereabouts.

On Sunday, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel admitted that he had to “attend to the complaints” of the people. This Monday, the president blamed “moderate politicians and terrorists” from South Florida for “heating up the streets of Cuba.” Then he added: “They were dumbfounded,” boasting about the effective way to stop demonstrations in the country.

Along the same lines, Vice Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cosio said the protests were “a desperate attempt by the United States to destabilize Cuba.” On the part of the government, the same support has been given by Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez, who said that if the United States was “concerned about the well-being of the Cuban people” it would lift the economic “embargo” and “remove Cuba from the list of supposed sponsors.” ” of terrorism.”

But although the protesters who took to the streets on Sunday chanted “freedom”, the first demands of the protest started for “food” and “current”, at a time when even the government had to recognize the economic crisis. That the country is going through, just compared to the early nineties, during a special period. Today, Cubans suffer from prolonged periods without electricity, low food supplies and shortages of medical supplies, a situation that only seems to worsen.

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