Cuba Facing Hybrid Warfare

By Ángel Guerra Cabrera on July 21, 2022

President Miguel Díaz-Canel deepening democracy in spite of hybrid war against Cuba. photo: Bill Hackwell

Cuba must learn to live, advance and develop under the rigors of the fourth generation -or hybrid- warfare with which the United States systematically harasses it. That is the approach that emerges from observing the tireless activity of the government, the Communist Party and the Cuban institutional system in all spheres of economic, political, social and cultural activity. In addition to struggling to recover and transform its economy, the island, to give a couple of examples of great importance, is engaged in two tremendous political and legislative challenges: the debate on the family code -already in the process of approval in the National Assembly of People’s Power, after receiving substantial modifications in popular assemblies- and the new communication law, two instruments that tend to deepen the vibrance of Cuban democracy.

Precisely, on Wednesday, the day in which the parliamentary commission discussed the opinion of the aforementioned code, President Miguel Díaz-Canel called, in the economic commission, to deepen Cuban democracy in the face of economic asphyxia and the subversive plans of the US. There is talk of the defeated imperialist and counterrevolutionary attempt of 9/11, but every day the Cuban people must face numerous manifestations of hostility, both in the economic, political and diplomatic order as well as in the cultural-communication battle. It is worth reiterating, so far President Joseph Biden has changed very little of the 243 measures added by Donald Trump to reinforce the blockade.

Biden’s administration announced the reestablishment of family remittances and a greater delivery of visas, but so far he has not implemented them. However, the gray Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced the day before yesterday the inclusion of Cuba in the black list of countries that do not perform well in human trafficking. It is a big lie, which identifies Cuba’s prestigious medical cooperation as “trafficking”.

In order to understand what fourth-generation warfare, or hybrid warfare, as applied to Cuba consists of, I briefly return to my previous week’s post. There I summarized different forms of aggression applied by the United States (US) against Cuba since 1959, the year of the revolutionary triumph. I tried to historically frame the social disorders provoked in the island on July 11, 2021 and to explain the combination of irritating factors that came together to propitiate them. Some, like the pandemic and the confinement, an objective reality. Others, the most deliberate, such as the cruelty with which the government of Donald Trump sought to intensify during the pandemic the hardships and shortages caused by the blockade in order to inflict the maximum degree of pain and despair on the Cuban people. All this combined with a ferocious onslaught on social networks and in the conventional media.

Based on its long experience of wars of aggression, hostile campaigns and coups d’état against peoples and governments, including those of the first Cold War against the USSR, the US has been modifying its military doctrine, adapting it to its scientific and technological development and to the advances and lessons learned from those it considers its enemies. That is to say, the revolutionary and progressive movements and governments, or also, those that do not subordinate themselves to the dictates of the empire. The fourth generation war is the combination of economic, financial and commercial asphyxiation, with which it bets on the division of the Cuban people. It is the use of digital networks, the digital media created for that purpose and the conventional ones, to sow hatred and violence in Cuba, no matter the lies and slander used. It is also the reiterated call for the US military intervention by the most vicious spokesmen of the counterrevolution. It is the millions of dollars of US taxpayers’ money used to sustain the aforementioned media campaigns and to pay the mercenary fifth column inside the island. In the height of delirium, they have gone so far as to use the slogan revolution, understanding as such the unleashing of chaos and social disorder in Cuba. Everything seems little enough to precipitate the longed-for day of the end of “communism”. It was not July 11 of 2021, nor November 15 and nothing happened this July 11 either. Instead, Havana, very calm.

It does not matter. Four days later they were already mounting an operation on the Twitter network, denounced by the Union of Cuban Journalists, whose analysts found 8,190 users, the vast majority located outside Cuba, who have generated 27,301 interactions in the last few days, in which, with the greatest impunity, they call for street violence on the island. It is obvious that none of these accounts will be closed by Twitter, as they have done to many users who defend the revolution.

Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English