Actress Bella Thorne slammed Cuba’s “heartless move” to tax food sales and called on President Joe Biden to end “brutal suffering” in the communist country, where food sales are taxed at 10 percent.
Earlier this month, Cuba announced a new 10 percent tax on retail food sales. The tax targets self-employed people and small and medium-sized companies in the retail food sector.
“I oppose the new tax on food sales by the anti-democratic Cuban regime because it amplifies the serious suffering of the people of Cuba,” Thorne told Fox News Digital.
“It’s a heartless move that deeply saddens me and motivates me to want to do even more me to fight to bring democracy to Cuba,” the former Disney actress added.
“I hold the tyrannical thugs in power accountable for this decision and the wave of brutal suffering it will inflict on the Cuban people who only want to be free like you and I are as Americans,” she said.
Thorne is asking Biden to “think about what it would be like as Americans to live six decades where you can’t share your thoughts or decide who represents you politically.”
“The dictatorship controls everything in Cuba, including media and access to the internet,” the actress said.
“President Biden can work to give more tools to access the internet to Cubans so they can prevent the Cuban government from suppressing activist messages on social media,” she added.
Thorn then mentioned tools like Psiphon, which she said is a “free open-source internet censorship circumvention app, so Cubans can communicate with one another to fight internet censorship by sophisticated firewalls.”
“There is no respect for human rights in Cuba,” she said.
The Biden White House, however, is currently begging and colluding with Big Tech companies to censor American citizens on social media.
To the Cuban people, Thorne shared the following message:
My heart goes out to you, and the raw suffering you are continuing to experience. As Americans, just know we care about freedom and we join with you because you deserve to be free. One day the Cuban regime will fall, so don’t lose hope. You will see a day where your desire for freedom like we have in America will come to you.
This is not the first time the actress has advocated for the people of Cuba.
Last summer — as thousands of Cubans took to the streets to demand an end to the 62-year-old communist regime — Thorne posted a photo of her father and her siblings on her Instagram with a lengthy caption calling for international aid to help people living in the communist country.
“My father was the first in his family to be born in the United States on a military base in Key West,” the star wrote. “The remainder of his family was born in Cuba, I don’t know my family in Cuba. I’ve never been able to travel and meet them.”
“I don’t know if they are caught up in the violence right now, if they have food, water or medicine,” she continued. “I don’t know if they are safe or survived the pandemic which is surging across that beautiful island.”
“What I do know is that Cuba needs our help,” Throne affirmed. “The Cuban people have reached a critical point in their ability to maintain a quality of life. Between the police violence, lack of basic human needs such as food and water, and the inability to control Covid outbreaks, the people are suffering and dying.”
“We need to help them,” she said. “They need international intervention. Please use your voice to bring awareness and ask the world to assist in the plight of the Cuban people.”
But Biden didn’t even acknowledge that the Cuban people were protesting communism last summer. Instead, the president claimed the anti-communist protests were about “rising COVID cases/deaths.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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