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Liuba lvarez leaves her home three times a week at 3:45 a.m. to queue outside her local supermarket for basic items like meat, oil and detergent. Her last line was relatively short: after eight hours she came home with minced meat in time for lunch. On other days, she doesn’t come back until 5 p.m.
It’s exhausting, says Lvarez, 47. Getting up early gives me migraines, but it’s the only way to get these products to feed my children.
Cubans are used to queues. But since the pandemic, endless queues, tight wages and power cuts have become an overwhelming reality for millions of people. And on Sunday, tensions spilled over into the biggest anti-government protests in decades. Social media, the pandemic and tightened U.S. sanctions combined with a younger generation hungry for higher standards of living have made a dangerous cocktail that the ruling Communist Party is struggling to cope with.
Cubans need cigarettes, coffee and food to be happy, Rey Alonso, 41, in central Havana said Tuesday. Four years ago we had everything you could go out and buy a can of cola. Now it’s all gone. Of course, people took to the streets!
Covid surge
Cuba has one of the lowest Covid death rates in the region, with less than 2,000 deaths from the disease since the start of the pandemic. But the island, which hospitalizes all those who test positive for the virus, has been hit hard by new variants: Cuba recorded a record 6,923 new infections on Saturday. #SOSCuba was all the rage on Facebook after hospitals in the western town of Matanzas were so overwhelmed that they put beds with patients in hallways. The increase in the number of cases has increased the anxiety of the population.
Developing its own Covid vaccines has been the top priority for states, and 17% of Cubans have so far been vaccinated. But investing money in vaccine production has left the state cash-strapped with few funds to import other essential drugs, and drugstore shelves are empty.
Trump sanctions still in effect
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on Monday criticized the Cuban regime for failing to meet the most basic needs of the population, including food and medicine. Yet for decades US policies have been explicitly designed to create such loopholes. (When first considering sanctions, President Dwight Eisenhower Assumed that if they [the Cuban people] are hungry, they will throw Castro.)
Donald Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against the island has reduced foreign currency inflows: flights to the island have been cut, cruise ships have been banned, remittances have been canceled, and US companies have been cut off. been allowed to sue multinationals investing in Cuba. The goal, then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo would have told diplomats, was to starve the country.
Then the pandemic struck, which drained tourism, one of Cuba’s last sources of foreign income.
States’ response to declining incomes was reluctantly to open dollar stores, a move that proved deeply unpopular as it vividly embodied the gap between the haves with access to foreign currency and the have-nots. . Dollar stores across the country were ransacked on Sunday.
Although he was vice president during Barack Obama’s rapprochement with Havana, Joe Biden did not cancel any of Trump’s sanctions. After losing Florida in 2020 in part because more than 60% of Cuban-Americans in South Florida voted Trump, the Biden administration is cautious about doing anything that might alienate that voting bloc.
Online activism
Cuba launched mobile internet late in 2018, but more than 4 million people now access the web through their phones.
The Internet and especially social media have changed the balance of power between citizens and the state. After hundreds of people stepped out in the western town of San Antonio de los Baos on Sunday morning, videos were viewed by residents of Havana within minutes.
The roughly $ 20 million a year in US federal funds spent on democracy promotion influences how Cubans view the Internet.
Anti-Castro news sites funded by US taxpayer money advertise heavily on Facebook and YouTube. VPNs are needed to make purchases with credit cards in Cuba and to download many apps. When you use the popular Psiphon VPN, for example, ads for Cubanet, DNA Cuba, and Diario de Cuba, all funded by the State Department, appear as paid content.
The articles in these media are overwhelmingly negative, adding to the sense of unhappiness, sadness and hopelessness that formed the backdrop for the Sunday protests.
In recent years, Internet access to dissident blogs and US government-funded news sites was blocked in Cuba, but major international news sites were available. Since Sunday evening, the internet has been cut off on the whole island.
Hunger for change
Politically, Cuba is marked by a marked generational gap: older generations who have lived in an era when health care, literacy and access to culture have improved considerably tend to support the government; but those born after the fall of the Soviet Union grew up in scarcity and deprivation and are more likely to oppose it.
This younger, less docile generation is often indifferent to the external causes of the islands’ plight (many are annoyed by the mention of the US blockade which they see as an excuse and, at times, a sham). The government is squarely responsible for a system that does not meet their needs.
This generational divide was clear on Sunday: the anti-regime demonstrators were overwhelmingly young; pro-government protesters tended to be older.
Claudia Genlui Hidalgo, 30, a member of Movimiento San Isidro, an artists’ collective opposed to restrictions on artistic freedoms, said the fact that the protests were spontaneous rather than organized indicates the level of discontent in Cuban society.
Cubans need a change for the better, she said. I would like to live in a democratic society where power is not so centralized.
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Sources 2/ https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jul/13/cuba-anti-government-protests-shortages-social-media-sanctions The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article |
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