The Castro regime in Cuba used its propaganda arms to publish multiple screeds on Monday condemning the United States and its “terrorists” for allegedly instigating ongoing protests against the 66-year-old communist system on the island.
Hundreds of Cubans in some of the nation’s largest cities, most prominently in the eastern cities of Bayamo and Santiago de Cuba, took to the streets on Sunday chanting “freedom” and demanding stable sources of food and electricity. While the entirety of Cuba’s infrastructure is in ruins, the result of decades of communist negligence, eastern Cuba has suffered some of the most prolonged routine electrical blackouts in the country. Locals complain that they go as long as 20 hours a day without electricity in some cases, threatening the freshness of the little food they have access to.
Cubans who publicly condemn the communist system can face disappearance, torture, and outrageously long criminal sentences on charges such as “disrespect” and “public disorder.” Children arrested on suspicions of opposing the regime have documented sexual assault and threats of rape from so-called law enforcement authorities.
Protests reportedly began in eastern Cuba on Sunday, attracting hundreds of people to the two largest cities of the region. Videos smuggled out of the country show large crowds of people shouting “Fatherland and Life,” an anti-communist slogan that plays on the communist motto “Fatherland or Death,” and demanding freedom. Initial reports indicated that local women and their children were the first to assemble against the government.
“This is full of people demanding freedom and change,” witness Juan Carlos Flores told the Miami-based America Teve broadcaster this weekend.
The regime responded to the protests by deploying the “black berets,” the special forces responsible for repressing Cuban dissidents. Reports indicate that multiple arrests have been made and some incidents of violence have occurred, but internet outages and state obfuscation have prevented independent outlets from fully confirming the details.
The protests continued into Monday in the El Cobre neighborhood of Santiago de Cuba, where people congregated outside the local police station.
“People can’t take this electricity situation anymore,” an anonymous protester in Santiago told the U.S.-based Martí Noticias. “There were women, children, elderly people.”
The protests are the latest in a nearly unceasing torrent of protests following the massive nationwide repudiation of communism on July 11, 2021, when an estimated 187,000 people took the streets demanding an end to the Castro regime. While international attention on the Cuban human rights issue waned in the ensuing months, protests continued on a regular basis. Nearly 4,000 protests were documented in Cuba in 2022, while 589 protests were documented on the island in July, the two-year anniversary of the 2021 protests, alone.
A man is arrested during a demonstration against the government of Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel in Havana, on July 11, 2021. Thousands of Cubans took part in rare protests against the communist government, marching through a town chanting, “Down with the dictatorship,” and “We want liberty.” (YAMIL LAGE/AFP via Getty)
The Castro regime responded to the March 17, 2024 protests by hastily distributing some food, eyewitnesses told Martí Noticias.
“People took the streets to demand they receive their food and they got their seven pounds of rice,” a local housewife explained to the outlet. “In other neighborhoods, they handed out chicken because it is not convenient for them for there to be turmoil in Santiago.”
“I ask myself, where did the rice come from, the chicken, and what they are distributing now?” the housewife asked. “Why do they have to wait for people to take the streets to give them what is theirs?”
Publicly, however, the regime is denying that the vast majority of the unrest is authentic, blaming instead the CIA, American “terrorists,” and other alleged villains.
“Yes, people went out into the street to demand, peacefully, without violence,” the official newspaper of the Communist Party Granma conceded on Tuesday. But the outlet went on to accuse “bot farms created by CIA labs” of “amplifying thousands of fake news [stories], multiplied to saturate the receptors [social media], limiting their capacity for objective response and analysis.”
“From the comfortable armchairs of their homes, or hidden behind their computers’ webcams, very far from the streets they want to ‘heat up,’ they attempted to sow chaos in our cities and towns,” Granma denounced, “taking advantage of the discontent about blackouts and shortages caused by the blockade.”
The Cuban government blames the nation’s rampant poverty – which communist elites do not have to contend with – on the limited human rights sanctions that the United States still keeps on the country, a specter of what was once called the “embargo.”
On television, the Cuban regime’s most prominent cable news-style show Roundtable similarly decried alleged “political operatives in Florida” for instigating the protests, refusing to lay any blame at the feet of the Castro regime. Roundtable contributors claimed that America was seeking “a remake of July 11” and dismissed the legitimate demands of the Cuban people.
The Cuban Foreign Relations Ministry (MINREX) issued a formal complaint to the U.S. embassy in Havana about the protests. According to Granma, Cuban diplomats “denounced the destabilizing plan and its execution” as well as the alleged “reinforcement of a ruthless economic war.”
“If the government of the United States had even the least concern and honesty regarding the wellbeing of the Cuban people, it would remove Cuba from the arbitrary list of states that supposedly sponsor terrorism,” MINREX demanded.
Cuba is on the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of Terrorism – along with Iran, Syria, and North Korea – due to the Castro regime’s close ties to several known terrorist organizations, including the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), whose leaders received safe refuge in Havana for years, and the Iranian proxy group Hezbollah.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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