Political tension in Cuba: President Díaz-Canel warns that he will repress if there are more protests

The police have restricted the entrance to the Capitol in Havana due to new calls for protests against the Cuban government, this Tuesday.Eliana Aponte / AP

Two messages released this Tuesday on Twitter by Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, reflect the tension that the island is experiencing after the unprecedented protests on Sunday.

The first says: “The Cuban revolution is not going to turn the other cheek to those who attack it in virtual and real spaces.

We will avoid revolutionary violence, but we will repress counterrevolutionary violence.

Whoever attacks law enforcement officers, attacks the country ”.

In the second, he affirms that "the counterrevolution dreams of a war between Cubans," and adds: "we are not going to indulge them."

That was the atmosphere in Cuba this Tuesday.

More information

• What is happening in Cuba?

  The keys to understanding the protests

Although again on Tuesday the streets of the capital and the main cities of the country woke up calm - yes, with a strong police deployment - the demonstrations that on July 11 shook different cities and towns of the country have already been installed in the collective imagination, marking a before and after. Since Monday, following the government's call, numerous like-minded groups have taken over parks and public spaces to stage their adherence to the revolution. In the National Capitol, next to the fraternity park, where the most important disturbances were recorded on Sunday, more than a hundred people gathered shouting

, by way of reparation for what happened the day before. In some neighborhood of Havana where there were attempts to protest, such as Arroyo de Naranjo, groups of loyalists armed with sticks and bats came out, as happened during the

, the protest that occurred on August 5, 1994 that led to the crisis of the rafters.

On that occasion, the disturbances on the boardwalk did not continue. The so-called “rapid response detachments” took to the streets and imposed order with blows, and then more than 30,000 Cubans jumped into the sea. But the protests on Sunday are unprecedented, both for their size and dispersion, and for the great repercussion they had thanks to the loudspeaker of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which the Government of Havana considers incendiary gasoline at the moment - since Sunday At night it is almost impossible to connect to the internet via mobile phone.

The impact of what happened has been great in the country. And if in the street, in the houses and in the workplaces these days nothing else is talked about, the same happens in the heights. An example of the extent to which the authorities have taken the demonstrations seriously is the meeting held on Sunday afternoon by the Political Bureau of the Cuban Communist Party, which was attended by Raúl Castro, although the former president is no longer part of that body. . "During the meeting, provocations orchestrated by counterrevolutionary elements, organized and financed from the United States with destabilizing purposes, were analyzed," said a press release published Tuesday by the official newspaper

, indicating that the session also addressed "the exemplary response of the people to the call of comrade Díaz-Canel to defend the Revolution in the streets, which allowed the subversive actions to be defeated."

Both in the

and in the latest protests, the background is the same, the great popular discontent due to the economic hardships and the crisis that the country is going through, which has caused a serious shortage and queues of hours to buy basic necessities, shortages of medicines and all kinds of food, the return of blackouts due to breaks in several thermoelectric plants, and a situation further aggravated by the worst outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic - on Tuesday there were more than 5,000 cases - which has put the Cuban health system on the ropes. And those conditions are not going to improve in the short term.

The Government of Cuba admits citizen unrest, but accuses the United States of being behind what happened and of manipulating social networks to promote the destabilization of the country. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez said that what happened on Sunday was not “a social outbreak; there were riots, disorder ”. "Even the international press recognizes that there were acts of violence in the riots, but not the social outbreak for which the US Government has been working, in a hidden way or more publicly in recent times," he added.

The tension is palpable in the speeches and in social networks the polarization is increasing. On Monday, dozens of young people who had been arrested the day before were released, but it is not known how many people are still in detention. The playwright Yunior García, one of the activists of the so-called 27N, who was arrested at the doors of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television, wrote as soon as he was released: “In the multiple interrogations that we experienced, it was clear that no one from outside guided us to go out, that absolutely no one paid us a penny to do what we did. But we also make our position and our ideas for change very clear, in a country that does not stop its fall into the ravine, with an acute health crisis, without medicine or food, with galloping inflation, an unpayable debtforeign currency stores that are expanding like octopuses, a country that is filled with hotels while the housing fund suffers a perennial danger of collapse and the hospitals do not supply. A town where discontent, chronic shortages, blackouts, prisoners of conscience are growing ”.

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