Over the summer, protests took place in the island nation of Cuba. Citizens took to the streets, fighting police and voicing their discontent with the regime. After international attention on Cuba, has anything changed?
Yvette Fuentes Ph.D., a Cuban American professor at NSU who studied Latin American history at University of Miami, said, “The reason why the protests were so successful is because of the Internet. That’s how they were able to disseminate that information.”
Protesters in Cuba used Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp to share information about the protests with other Cubans and the outside world, but Fuentes noticed something else on social media.
“What we noticed on social media is that most Cuban Americans, no matter their background or their political leanings, whether they’re a Democrat or a Republican, there was a certain camaraderie.”, said Fuentes.
Nelson Bass, Ph.D., a professor at NSU who has done research in Cuba, attributed the protests to the internet, as well as a new economic phenomenon in Cuba.
“They are driven by an emerging middle class… Since Obama’s openings in 2012, all of a sudden you have a brand-new group of citizens who would traditionally be considered a middle-class group. So, the state, which used to guarantee employment, but also made sure there was no challenge from a capitalist class, said ‘we can’t afford this’ so they cut it,” said Bass
Cuba’s woes do not just start and end with finances.
“This also includes a lot of different social groups. There has been space given to voices of the LGBTQ community and the Afro-Cuban community. One of the tensions in Cuban politics is as the state tries to become more inclusive and less authoritarian, it gives breathing room to all of these different groups to voice their discontent,” said Bass.
Fuentes commented on the international praise of the protests, “It’s not something limited to Miami, Florida or Cuba. It’s all over the place.”
“Countries that had a hands-off approach to Cuba, like Canada and parts of Europe, are saying, for the first time, that there needs to be widespread change,” said Bass.
This casts a spotlight on the U.S. and what the Biden administration plans to do.
“The Trump administration, which did not win re-election, tapped into things that were happening in places like Venezuela and were able to convince people that we had to tighten the screws again,” said Bass, “This has put president Biden in a very unenviable situation where he’s being accused by his critics from day one for being soft on ‘the left’. What I see is a sort of stalemate, a waiting game. At the moment, Cuba is in the midst of a humanitarian crisis.”
Regardless of President Biden’s next move, one thing is for certain, support of the regime is shrinking.
“Much of it can be traced to the end of an era. There are things the Cuban model has done well and things it has done very poorly. The Cuban romantic myth has been pierced. Nobody is interested in ‘socialism or death’ when it’s lead by a career bureaucrat as they were when it was a bunch of 20 and 30 somethings with beards that talked about justice and equality,” said Bass
Bass gave a prediction for Cuba,
“In five years, there are two roads: there is a road where the system collapses… by that I mean the military would defect, take the side of the protesters and refuse to crackdown. The other road is the vaccine rollout continues; they latch on to vaccine tourism, the state’s able to right itself in terms of providing these basic services and the middle class continues to grow. Eventually I think you will see a move towards democratic norms because there’s popular pressure in a way that hasn’t been exerted before.”
There is an unseen benefit that is expected to come out of the protests. Fuentes issued her own prediction, referencing past major events like El Mariel and the Maleconazo.
“I think in terms of literature, we are going to see some writers, some literature, some fiction coming out in the next few years,” said Fuentes
Cuba is in the transitionary period from dictatorship to a democratic country, what needs to be decided is how much of the old guard is given up and how much remains.
Speaking about the new Cuban middle class, Bass gave this last piece of information.
“If you really want to get rid of a repressive authoritarian regime, the best way to do it is to create groups of individuals inside the country that have a vested interest in seeing change,” said Bass.
