La Jornada Editorial on July 13, 2021
Cubans defend their Revolution in the streets.
Thousands of Cubans demonstrated last Sunday against shortages of basic goods, shortages and intermittent power cuts, among other demands. Completely unusual for protests on the island, the marches saw looting of stores and attacks on police patrols, as well as violent arrests of those causing disturbances.
In response, President Miguel Díaz-Canel attended the protest held in the town of San Antonio de los Baños to listen to the demands of the population and explain the reasons for the hardships afflicting the country. The President acknowledged that not all the demonstrators are “counterrevolutionaries, far from it”, but “dissatisfied” people, but he also denounced the destabilization campaign orchestrated by the Cuban-American mafia, and said that “those who encourage these demonstrations do not want the welfare of the people, but the privatization of health and education, neoliberalism”.
It would be puerile to deny that in that country, as in any other, there is a social sector dissatisfied with the authorities and determined to take to the streets to raise their demands; it is known, on the other hand, that this malaise has been exacerbated and expanded as a consequence of the prolonged pandemic that has paralyzed tourism, one of the main sources of employment and income on the island; on the other hand, it is clear that the difficulties experienced by millions of Cubans originate, in part, in the inefficiencies of the government and in bureaucratic inertias.
However, it would be enormously naïve to believe that there is no promotion of these demonstrations from Washington and Miami, and it would be absurd to ignore the weight that the six decades of the U.S. blockade against the island have had in the gestation of this social anger, since this brutal and permanent violation of the human rights of all Cubans is expressly designed to generate unrest against the regime and to break it through hunger and generalized shortages.
In the current circumstances, the hostility of the United States against Havana is also inserted as a foreign force that clouds the legitimate claims of Cuban society and obscures the understanding of its discomforts.
Therefore, President Joe Biden’s call for the Cuban government to “attend to the needs” of its people at this vital moment is unheard of perversity: it is the U.S. blockade and not the Cuban authorities that prevents the island from acquiring the basic supplies to deal with the pandemic, and the first measure to end the “economic suffering” denounced by the Democratic politician is to lift the embargo that has held Cuban trade and finances in check for more than half a century.
It is clear that the only sensible approach to the difficulties facing the island is to let the Cubans themselves decide what they want to do with their country. As expressed yesterday by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the situation of the Cuban people should not be used to intervene in the internal affairs of an independent, free and sovereign nation, whose government and citizens should seek a solution through dialogue.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English