In Cuba, conflict and dissent due to various forms of organization of society and the State have always had precarious channels of institutional and media expression.
What we are seeing in recent days is a social explosion, very similar to those that have shaken most Latin American countries in recent years.
Tens of thousands of Cubans, who have accumulated economic and political grievances for decades, have taken to the streets peacefully and spontaneously.
That happens when the discomfort does not find another way to express itself.
In recent years, the economic situation has deteriorated rapidly. In this deterioration weighs the increase in sanctions of the Donald Trump government, not reversed so far by the new Democratic administration of Joe Biden. But they also weigh, although the Government of Miguel Díaz-Canel, his media and his allies refuse to accept it, the brake that the Communist Party of Cuba put on economic reforms since 2016 and the exclusionary and repressive way in which it has treated various samples of recent malaise in the population.
When on the night of November 27, 2020, hundreds of young artists and intellectuals from the island sat peacefully outside the Ministry of Culture to protest against the repression of the San Isidro Movement and to demand guarantees for independent art, the government's reaction He was uncompromising. After a vague promise of dialogue, the media and State Security subjected these young people to cellular, hand-to-hand harassment, which persists to this day, and to a daily disqualification, as “mercenaries” and “counterrevolutionaries”, in the media.
That same official logic, now applied against dozens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of citizens across the island, prevails. On July 11, President Miguel Díaz-Canel said in San Antonio de los Baños, one of the towns where there were protests, that the protesters were "counterrevolutionaries" or "revolutionaries confused" by the "enemy's campaigns." They were not citizens fed up with precariousness, shortages and repression, who legitimately took to the streets. They were enemies or accomplices of the United States who had to be confronted, in those same streets, by the revolutionaries, following a voice that calls for combat.
The following day, at a press conference in the Palace of the Revolution, the president and other officials reiterated the same perspective. What continued to happen, since the protests continued on July 12, was a "soft or continued coup", which was part of the "unconventional war of the United States against Cuba." Once again, all those Cubans who shouted "Freedom" and "Homeland and life" were presented as pawns of Washington. Not only that, they were not peaceful protesters, but "delinquents", "criminals", "vulgar" and "indecent", in a new sample of the deeply rooted elitist and racist mentality of Cuban power.
In that press conference, the Government of the island established that the clearest antecedent of the Cuban protests was the popular mobilizations of 2019 in Caracas and other cities of Venezuela against the re-election of Nicolás Maduro, which took place in clearly irregular conditions. , with the National Assembly intervened, a perpetual constituent power and without opposition participation. Then the Venezuelan government reduced, in the media, all protests to street “guarimbas”. With that analogy, it was being said that the Cuban social outbreak would be faced as an outbreak of "counterrevolutionary" violence, sponsored by the United States. Faced with something thus named, the same in Venezuela as in Cuba, there is no other official response than repression.
The constant arrests, police abuses and media disqualifications that have followed the protests respond to this repressive scheme, already tested in Venezuela. By explicitly connecting the Cuban situation with that of Venezuela, Havana once again refers the conflict to a perspective of “regional security”, very similar to that used by the United States government itself in its hemispheric hegemony. In fact, the official Cuban position is that what is happening does not have endogenous causes, such as the recent changes in monetary policy, electricity cuts or the shortage of medicines and food, but is an exclusive consequence of hostility from the United States.
By denying the legitimacy of the social outbreak and even contesting its linguistic relevance — that power demonstrates an unusual intolerance of words; It is also bothered by terms such as "embargo", "dissidence" or "humanitarian aid" - the Cuban government refers, entirely, the internal conflict to the historical dispute with the United States. For the umpteenth time, that strange inverted colonial perspective reappears, which does not admit that the Cuban reality has its own content, determined by the tensions between a State that does not want to change and a society that changes rapidly, as the 21st century advances.
The repression of these days will add more grievances to a vulnerable, low-income population, victims of racism and machismo, which probably rejects, for the most part, the hostility and trade embargo of the United States, but which directs its discontent against the Government of the Island. A considerable part of this humble Cuban population, which traditionally boasts the bureaucracy as its own, has shown that it believes that the Cuban government is the most responsible for its situation. You have valid reasons to think so.