Some thoughts: Cuban protests
This week's protests are the biggest mobilization the island has seen since the 1990s
“Some thoughts” is a new section of the substack, based around shorter posts that are less based on researching a topic and more on my opinions on any given issue.
Starting last Sunday, Cubans took to the streets for the most significant protest the country has seen since the Maleconazo of 1994, and probably the biggest mobilization since the Revolution itself. The protesters are many, loosely organized, and seem to have mostly disparate demands, with commonalities being their poor living conditions, the island’s economy being pummeled by COVID, a lethargic vacccination effort, and of course, criticisms over the Cuban Communist Party’s (CCP) oppressive rule.
However, the majority of the protesters simply seem dissatisfied with their general quality of life, citing “misery”. Regardless, there seem to be three main demands: better economic conditions, a faster COVID-19 vaccination drive, and political freedoms. I’ll go briefly over them.
Let’s start with political freedoms. I have an extremely unusual, controversial take on democracy: it’s good. Everyone deserves to live in one, regardless of the actual form it takes, as long as it’s a real democracy with real, meaningful elections. Cuba is not a democracy: its President, Miguel Díaz-Canel, was the only candidate allowed to run on the slate of the only legally recognized party. Cuba frequently cracks down on opposition leaders, has virtually no freedom of expression, and is plagued by human rights abuses. Additionally, the CCP has responded to the protests by shutting off the internet so they can control the narrative as they attempt to violently pummel the protesters into submission. The Cuban military and intelligence apparatus also routinely supports the Venezuelan government, helping it maintain its grip on power through unchecked violence. The people of Cuba are unarguably right on this one and they deserve to live in a country with leaders who actually respond to them and represent their views, instead of being handpicked by a ruling elite and crushing dissent with violence when they don’t have their way. This is reason enough to oppose the Cuban government, in my view.
Now, vaccinations. It is actually surprising, but the Cuban government is handling COVID disastrously: the country’s cases have been growing out of control since mid-June, and it has only vaccinated 26% of its population, even when it developed multiple vaccines against the virus. Why hasn’t the country vaccinated its own population, at literally the same time it has been negotiating exporting millions of doses to Argentina? Geopolitics.
There are, roughly, two kinds of vaccine producers. The first are private companies (and Oxford University) from Western nations: Pfizer, Moderna, J&J, AstraZeneca, etc. The second, are state-backed consortia of autocracies: Sputnik V, the Chinese ones, the Cuban Soberana and Abdala vaccines, the thyme-based Venezuelan serum (which not even the Venezuelan government believes in). The Western companies sell to every country. At the nation-state level, democracies have very strong incentives to vaccinate their population, because it’s very popular. Autocracies have weaker ones, mostly due to their legitimacy not being challenged if they pull it off. But companies in autocratic nations respond, more or less, to the government, and many autocracies have actual government agencies develop the vaccines: Sputnik’s creator, the Gamaleya Institute, and the Findlay Institute of Cuba. Autocrats have much more pressing needs than domestic popularity: geopolitical leverage and, as a result, countries such as Russia and Cuba will export enormous amounts of vaccines as a way of gaining alliances and strengthening their regimes while their population either isn’t vaccinated at all or simply rejects the vaccine out of distrust.
Finally, living conditions. First, let’s go to contextual reasons: Cuba’s economy depends strongly on tourism, an industry that was battered by the virus, so the country’s GDP crashed 10% in 2020. Plus, a number of highly specific factors (bad sugar harvest, international price craziness, whatever the hell is happening in Venezuela) led to a wave of power outages, shortages, and all-around inmiseration.
Cuba is under a trade embargo from the US, and has been since the 1960s, although it does seem to exclude food and medicine, at least since 2000. This has very obviously harmed Cubans, with literally nothing to show for it. However, the island’s troubles are many and far reaching. Since the Revolution, GDP per capita has grown sluggishly, mostly due to incredibly weak productivity. That the Revolution hasn’t been particularly successful at growing the economy isn’t even controversial with the CCP: earlier this year officials talked about prioritizing the size of the cake over the share each group gets. Thus, the economy has been slowly, steadily liberalized since the 2000s, even while the country replaced its longstanding dependence on the USSR with ties to Venezuela (an increasingly disfunctional partner), Russia, and China - plus, weirdly enough, Argentina and Bolivia. You can read more about the Cuban economy’s troubles here.
Will the protesters “win”? Extremely unlikely.
In their favor are their large numbers, their highly sympathetic demands, the backing they’re receiving from powerful nations such as the US, and their government’s extreme lack of experience handling dissent. Díaz-Canel responded initially by cracking down viciously on the protesters, plus giving incendiary speeches straight out of the Chavista playbook accusing everyone with a pulse of being a CIA plant. The governent’s meandering approach also showed on Twitter, where they decided to feud with lefty Calle 13 singer Residente (in a since-deleted tweet). After a rhetoric moderation, the government continued to resort to violence.
Against them, are the usual “unorganized protest movement vs autocrat” track record, the fact that the CCP doesn’t really have much of an incentive to not crack down (what will the West do, place sanctions?), and the fact that global authoritarianism has two generous patrons in Russia and, to a lesser extent, China, both of which are allied with the Cuban regime.
What should the US do? Basically, Biden needs to show toughness to restore his margins among Cubans and conservative Latinos (it seems), so just unilaterally softening Cuba policy would put the key swing state of Florida in danger. However, he should also try to incentivize the Cuban government to do anything about it. Unilaterally unpunishing an autocrat in the middle of a vicious crackdown is not Game Theory behavior. Plus, he should revert his ridiculous objection to receiving Cuban refugees directly, which as it seems even applies to those in actual, provable danger of being targeted by the government.
All in all, for us non-Cubans, defenses of Cuba are a typical “rhetoric posturing in favor of correct aesthetics” with support of various frequently shady statistics. Not to mention, even if Cuba was paradise on Earth and its medical system wasn’t plagued by statistics tampering and human rights abuses, it being one of the most repressive regimes in the Americas is reason enough to side with the people being repressed and not with rich, powerful, unelected elites. Every Cuban being able to read doesn’t matter if they can’t choose what to read.
Cuba being an increasingly impoverished, stagnant miliary autocracy doesn’t mean siding with far-right nutjobs and their endless bloodlust, who call for a military intervention. Yet again, nobody except the most unhinged actors are calling for an invasion, and it generally is an unserious proposal that is also centered on posturing. Echoing those claims would not only be wrong, it would be counter-productive, by giving credence to the CIA conspiracy rumors and by dividing those who actually support freedom on the island.