Scarce and information warfare fuel recent protest in Cuba

Hello, hivers. Last Saturday, a protest of not inconsiderable magnitude took place in Caimanera, an interesting Cuban municipality that geographically comprises the Naval Station that the United States occupied —since 1903— in the province of Guantanamo (after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the Government here has defended that the occupation is illegal due to the conditions under which that cession was agreed, in favor of a country that already could impose its hegemonic dreams).

As seen in several videos posted on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, the mobilization was peaceful, though naive in its demands, and ended up being quelled by special security forces. Of course, it emerged as a result of the crisis we are experiencing: on the one hand, we have the lack of food, basic toiletries, and medicines —with the corresponding and unstoppable inflation—, and on the other hand, a rickety and for me poorly planned electrical system, which has Cubans in check with annoying power cuts, which can reach a total of 12 hours a day, generally distributed in two sessions (to this already complicated panorama is added again in the last few weeks the unavailability of diesel, gasoline, and liquefied gas). This contributes to progressively undermining the political and social consensus built for years by the leadership that defeated dictator Fulgencio Batista in Eisenhower's time.

As the crisis has been sustained, the pressure on the Government has grown, and it was never stronger than on July 11, 2021, when hundreds of Cubans took to the streets to protest food access and blackouts, and, to a lesser extent, also to demand "freedom" (along the way I will make it clear why I am putting the sacrosanct concept in quotation marks). Last year there were new protests —although scattered and smaller— for the same shortcomings.

The big picture

I believe in criticism, in the practice of putting everything that exists on trial; I certainly believe firmly in social protest and public demonstration. But I like all that coming from previous reasoning that takes into account the whole context so that the analysis is fair, and the decision to raise the voice is taken only when the arguments are solid.

In principle, it seems to me the most natural thing in the world that, faced with the crisis and the void of solutions on the part of the Cuban Executive, the population should demonstrate, but then, without diminishing any share of responsibility in the problem to the Cuban government —which bears a great deal of it— it seems to me inconceivable that this should be done without assimilating in all its dimensions what its dispute with the United States means for the country.

I have already talked about it here and I cannot repeat myself, except to remind you that here is the U.S. Government itself saying that its battery of sanctions against Cuba is the most comprehensive applied to any country, where you practically need a license from the Treasury and Commerce Departments to import or export a mere look to or from the Island. This needs to mean something.

Nacho Montes de Oca, an independent Argentine journalist with a certain impact on Twitter, commenting on events far away from him, such as what happened in Caimanera, said that he doesn't believe the explanation —or justification— of the blockade/embargo (as that sanctions regime is indistinctly called) because the United States "continues to trade" with us. The invitation I made to him, and which I leave to you too, my dear reader in Hive, is to model the performance of your country's economy based on the same conditions imposed here and here by referred agencies, even assuming that the variable where we can enclose government effectiveness/efficiency/responsibility has a behavior of excellence.

What I mean by the responsible and efficient government is that it seems evident to me that even if the Cuban economy were governed by a motley and capitalist council of theorists composed of Ricardo, Adam Smith, Hayek, von Mises, Rothbard, Friedman, or Keynes himself, they could likely take it to better heights, but they would have an equally difficult time because of the yoke of the greatest power that humanity has ever given birth to, and which sanctions most of the commercial transactions in the world.

Information war

I have also discussed the so-called democracy programs that implement the U.S. government's regime change strategy toward Cuba. This effort is aimed at patiently fostering, in an aggregate manner, communicational capacities, and citizen activism that contribute to the overthrow of the political system. So, first, it is a matter of drowning it economically by seeking the Mallory effect (those versed in Cuba know what this is all about), and then it seeks to foster from within the birth of a movement that will eat away at the foundations of the system.

But the latter, although it has an impact —especially in the intellectual sphere—, has quickly in recent years come to play a secondary role in the face of a concert of YouTubers, in truth influencers who have conveniently assumed a conservative discourse, that of "being tough on Cuba", intellectually and theoretically empty, defenders of the Proud Boys and the second amendment, sometimes anti-immigrant if you will, that based on the obvious cracks that are observed daily in Cuban society, make good numbers and gain followers by the hundreds in a population without tools to get out unscathed in the realm of post-truth.

Then, I'm not worried about protests, that people go out here, there, or thereabouts, but that people lack critical thinking, and instead they are critics for the sake of being critics. It worries me that people repeat like parrots what they hear in those channels, without meditating and subjecting to verification of any claim, without separating the facts from the [misleading] "ornaments" of the story.

Just yesterday I was listening to one of these actors referring to an alleged video of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, where she seems clumsy, and which everyone who knows how to move in the dense network of the Internet found out very quickly that it was manipulated in deep fake mode. But how many of his followers reach this weekly compilation of fake news from AP to do fact-checking?

I also experimented with my students past Monday by watching a video capsule of another YouTuber, also operating from Florida, trying to find out how capable they were of detecting the hoax. None of them knew how to spin the basic moves we should make when faced with a statement such as the sold in the transmission, that is: that Cuba was the poorest country in Latin America with 72% of its population below the poverty threshold (where was the data extracted from?; what is the prestige and how much political bias can be recognized for the authors of the report?; what methodology did they use; how was the sample chosen; how much transparency was there towards the "participants" about the origin of the funds to develop the survey —paid "happily", I can assure you, by the American taxpayer—; etc).

And so, except for the weekend, every day there is an accumulation of more than 24 hours of content that, yes, is nourished by facts, such as the referred big crisis we are living through or the clumsiness that floods political communication in Cuba, but it is misleading, manipulative, and selects the topics very well. It is precisely this whole discourse, uncritically assimilated, that the people who came out in Caimanera last Saturday had in their heads, shouting that it is a "lie", for example, that there is an iron and disturbing economic policy on the part of the United States towards their country because that's what they hear over and over again, every day, from Miami.

Freedom, democracy, and bread

I end with this section discussing a tweet from Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar, of Cuban origin. In essence, she says that the people of Caimanera, despite the fact that they don't have food, medicine, water, or electricity, ask for "freedom", because they know that being free will bring them rest.

María Elvira writes from the first economy of the world, and even there this proportional relationship doesn't occur in a natural and massive way. If we were to parachute into any country where Salazar tells us that there is "freedom" —that is, democracy—, we would find that they all have their bills to pay in this respect (I have referred before that I understand this concept metaphorically as a sack into which one throws citizen practices that go far beyond the vote), and that in many of them, being conservative, there are people, and sometimes many people, without bread and water.

In my Latin American Report # 22, in fact, I talked about how in Peru the World Bank has recently calculated that seven out of ten Peruvians are poor or vulnerable to falling into that state. And I am talking about a country that is not persecuted in all its international transactions, and that is not subject to coyundas when it goes to the market to export its copper (as does happen to Cuba with nickel or cobalt).

Look, I also want bread, like all my fellow countrymen, and more democracy and expanded opportunities for people to grow organically. But I also think that the political experiment that is still underway, with all its mistakes and ravings, which are never exclusive, must prove its value or its failure as an alternative without interference —I see this as a sovereign right—, and above all we need conscious citizens who know how to interpret the context and act accordingly (and oppose accordingly as well). I end with a very powerful phrase that I remember having heard several times in the voice of Fernando Martinez Heredia, the best philosopher that Cuba has given in recent years: "Rebellion is the adulthood of culture". Thank you for reaching my post and have an excellent day.