‘Everyone has a tipping point’: Hunger fuels Cuba’s protests
Hospitals and pharmacies have run out of medicines as basic as penicillin and aspirin. Blackouts have become maddeningly frequent and agonizingly long. Cubans lucky enough to have foreign currency wait in line for hours for staples like beans and rice.
A searing economic decline, leading to hardships Cubans have rarely seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union devastated their country in the 1990s, has stirred the island’s largest protest movement in decades, eliciting a chorus of support from American politicians and angry threats from Cuba’s government.
“We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom,” President Biden said in a statement on Monday, citing what he called “decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime.”
His comments followed an astonishing wave of demonstrations on Sunday, when thousands took to the streets around the nation, shouting phrases like “freedom” and “Homeland and life,” a twist on the governing Communist Party’s motto: “Homeland or death.”
Protesters even overturned a police car and looted a government-run store — acts of open defiance shared widely online in a nation with a long and ruthlessly effective history of quashing dissent.
Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, the first person outside of the Castro family to lead the country since the Cuban Revolution more than 60 years ago, has cast the outpouring as an existential threat.
“They’ll have to walk over our dead bodies if they want to take on the revolution,” he said in remarks prominently displayed on the front page of the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma on Monday. “We’re willing to do everything and we’ll be on the streets battling.”
But even he had to acknowledge the severity of the nation’s problems, saying on Monday that he understood how trying the past few months had been for Cubans. He pleaded for their patience, while also calling the demonstrations the product of an underhanded campaign by Washington to exploit peoples’ “emotions” at a time when the island is facing food scarcity, power cuts and a growing number of Covid-19 deaths. [Continue reading…]