By Jim Geraghty
Monday, July 12,
2021
The protests and clashes that exploded
across Cuba yesterday probably do not yet mark the end of that country’s
authoritarian, Communist regime. But that regime no longer has quite such an
uncontested grip over the country — and an authoritarian regime’s ability to
hold onto power is often dependent upon a monopoly of force and the ability to
deliver goods and services that people can’t get anywhere else. Cubans always
had to deal with rampant corruption, the U.S. embargo, and the fact that the
country’s most driven and independent citizens keep risking their lives by
jumping into rafts and attempting to cross 90 miles of ocean full of sharks.
Now throw in COVID-19 and the long lapse in the tourism industry, and the immiseration
of the Cuban people has reached an intolerable point.
The New York Times summarizes
today that, “in a country
known for repressive crackdowns on dissent, the rallies were widely viewed as astonishing. Activists and analysts
called it the first time that so many people had openly protested against the
Communist government since the so-called Maleconazo uprising, which exploded in
the summer of 1994 into a huge wave of Cubans leaving the country by sea.”
The Associated
Press reported from Havana:
Although
many people tried to take out their cellphones and broadcast the protest live,
Cuban authorities shut down internet service throughout the afternoon.
About 2
1/2 hours into the march, some protesters pulled up cobblestones and threw them
at police, at which point officers began arresting people and the marchers
dispersed.
AP
journalists counted at least 20 people who were taken away in police cars or by
individuals in civilian clothes.
“The
people came out to express themselves freely, and they are repressing and
beating them,” Rev. Jorge Luis Gil, a Roman Catholic priest, said while
standing at a street corner in Centro Habana.
About 300
people close to the government then arrived with a large Cuban flag shouting
slogans in favor of the late President Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution.
Some people from the group assaulted an AP videojournalist, disabling his
camera, while an AP photojournalist was injured by the police.
Deutsche Welle stated that, “President and
head of the Communist Party Miguel Diaz-Canel attended one of the protests in
San Antonio de Los Banos, which is
located west of Havana. Social media footage showed protesters shouting insults
at the president.”
Protests that seem to explode out of
nowhere usually have a long fuse. Mary Anastasia O’Grady wrote in
the Wall Street Journal on December 20, 2020, about the dissident-artist San Isidro Movement:
As the San
Isidro Movement gains street cred in the barrio, support from other dissident
groups, and recognition abroad, the question on the minds of long-suffering
Cubans is whether this time things are different. There are good reasons to
remain cautiously pessimistic about the odds of political change. But it’s also
true that Cuban civil society seems to be undergoing a revival, and that makes
the landscape markedly different than it was even 10 years ago.
And Agence France-Presse, among
others, spotlighted a
particularly popular and controversial protest anthem on February 25 of this
year:
In Cuba,
where music and revolution are intertwined, a song by rappers boldly denouncing
the communist government has found viral appeal online — but angered a regime
that keeps close tabs on culture.
Entitled
“Patria y Vida” (Fatherland and Life) — a positive spin on the slogan “Patria o
Muerte” (Fatherland or Death) coined by Fidel Castro in 1960 — the song has
racked up more than two million views since its release on YouTube on February
16.
It boasts
nearly 130,000 likes — but also 4,400 dislikes.
The track
does not pull any punches.
Singers
sporting gold chains, hoodies and backwards baseball caps rattle off a long
list of grievances about poverty, repression and misrule before declaring: “It
is over” and “We are not afraid.”
It didn’t generate a ton of attention, but
Raul Castro stepped down as the head of the Cuban regime in April. Whether or
not you buy into the “great man theory”
of history, leaders are not interchangeable. Ayman
al-Zawahiri cannot inspire followers the way Osama bin Laden could. Our Jay
Nordlinger observed at the time of Castro’s retirement that odious, repressive
regimes often outlast their most charismatic leaders — but not always.
Back at the end of June, Human Rights
Watch detailed that, “Cuban
authorities have jailed and prosecuted several artists and journalists who are
critical of the government. Police
and intelligence officers have routinely appeared at the homes of other artists
and journalists, ordering them to stay there, often for days and even weeks.
The authorities have also imposed temporary targeted restrictions on people’s
ability to access cellphone data.”
After a while, the oppressed citizens of
an authoritarian state just don’t have that much more to lose.
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