Activists supporting protests in Cuba gather in BLM Plaza near the White House on July 15, 2021, in Washington, DC.
- Cuban authorities restored Internet access on July 14, 2021 after three days of outages after unprecedented protests broke out over the weekend, AFP journalists said.
(Photo by Daniel SLIM / AFP) D
Editor's Note:
Carlos Alberto Montaner is a writer, journalist, and CNN contributor.
His columns are published in dozens of newspapers in Spain, the United States and Latin America.
Montaner is also vice president of the Liberal International.
The opinions expressed here are solely his
(CNN Spanish) - I
begin with disclosure: I am a Cuban exile who rejects all dictatorships.
Those on the left and those on the right.
And I get straight to the point.
It is not the end of the Cuban Revolution, but the beginning of the end. As seen on television, a generalized protest against that government broke out. They even have a hymn: Homeland and life. They know the song. They sing it. The protest is prolonged in time and in places. They have not been able to silence her. In a long dozen towns and cities, emboldened Cubans, almost all very young, began to parade and shout slogans against the regime. They asked and ask for freedom. Freedom to create wealth and to do what they want with their lives. This has been made possible by the communications provided by the Internet. By the influencers. By Facebook, by Instagram and by Twitter. Because of the economic crisis that the town suffers. Due to the pandemic that has accumulated the dead and sick in some hospitals in the fourth world and has disbanded tourists.In the inclement summer without electric fans and much less air conditioners. Due to the lack of food, drinking water, medicine, fuel and housing. In Cuba there is only repression. Only the stick and the tentetieso abound.
What is happening in Cuba?
Protests, economic crisis and the impact of covid-19
Miguel Díaz-Canel has blamed the United States government for the protests, adding that trade sanctions are responsible for the economic misery.
In short: the Cuban Revolution is exhausted. It was time. 62 years is too long for any failed political experiment. Why failed? Because it is tremendously unproductive. If the objective of any revolution is for society to live better, that revolution must be classified as failed. People are living worse with each passing day. The proper question is not why it has run out, but why it has lasted so long. The answer given by the regime has to do with its origins: the government, they say, does not owe its authority to the former USSR. It is true, but it does owe its consolidation to the Soviet Union. During the 1960s there were tens of thousands of Soviet advisers who accompanied the work of setting up the communist system.
They began with the intelligence services.
Spying is something totalitarians are very good at.
There was key Osvaldo Sánchez Cabrera, a communist since he was a teenager and a key figure in the Cuban G-2, who was said to be a man very close to the KGB.
He died on January 9, 1961, in a dark aviation accident at the Varadero airfield.
According to the official version, it was due to bad weather.
But there were people who said that it had been shots from the antiaircraft “four mouths”.
recently installed in the area.
In any case, we are not facing a conspiratorial vision of that history.
If it was shots, those who did did not know that they had killed one of the leaders of the Cuban G-2.
They thought it was a plane that came from the United States and had not been correctly identified.
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On March 4, 1960, the Soviet-Spanish Colonel Francisco Ciutat arrived in Cuba to advise the Cuban Government on how to transform an elementary army of guerrillas into a formidable apparatus that, at the time, could be in charge of the African wars in Angola and Ethiopia. Fidel Castro himself gave him the alias so that he would not show himself with the surname Ciutat. Angel Martínez Riosola named him. The "comrade" Angelito was key in the defeat of the Escambray guerrillas. For now, he baptized them, as had happened in the USSR, as "bandits." The guerrillas retaliated by wounding him in combat. He died many years later in Havana.
In 1976, a Constitution was approved that closely followed the Stalin spawn of 1936. It seemed that the revolution was institutionalizing itself by abandoning the "inventions" of Fidel Castro. For example, a cheese pipeline that would flood the world with a "better than French Camembert." How? Product of 1,000 White Udders, wonderful cows that would fill Cuba with rivers of milk. Caturra coffee, which germinated even on the stones, and with whose seeds the commander ordered to surround the cities, with the idea of creating an extraordinary coffee environment. Some inexpensive Australian birds that barely fed and other such wonders. Everything was useless. The commander loved to play God even though it almost always went wrong. He died in 2016, shortly after having bequeathed the moringa to the human species,a plant from India with some medicinal purposes, but according to him, it would serve to feed Cubans and any biped who believed or took into account its legendary properties.
Can these demonstrations put an end to the Cuban Revolution? They will do so in the medium or long term, unless the Cubans on the island resist in the streets, as happened with the Ukrainians. For now, some of the protesters say that the police are as fed up with the revolution as they are. They are hungry, poorly paid, and they hear the same wailing at home as the common people. It is the right setting for a perfect storm.