Cuban local authorities denied a request Tuesday for an islandwide anti-government demonstration planned for Nov. 15 by a broad coalition of young Cubans, artists and dissidents, arguing it was a provocation backed up by the U.S. government aimed at destabilizing the country.
In a letter addressed to one of the leaders behind the initiative, the playwright Yunior Trebol, Havana local authorities said the march is “illegal” and conceived as part of a U.S. plan for regime change. The official government news outlet Cubadebate first published the letter.
The call for a peaceful demonstration in November is increasing the pressure on the Cuban government to allow political opposition in the communist country, at a time when its violent crackdown of protesters drew international condemnation.
In an attempt to keep alive the spark of the unprecedented July 11 protests, a new civil society group named Archipiélago tried to test Cuba’s new constitution, whose article 56 recognizes the right to peaceful demonstrations, and notified authorities in several provinces of their intention to protest, initially on Nov. 20. According to the group’s letters delivered to local authorities, the march is “against violence, to demand that all the rights of all Cubans be respected, for the release of political prisoners and for the solution of our differences through democratic and peaceful means.”
Archipiélago, created by a diverse coalition of artists from the groups Movimiento 27N and San Isidro, young intellectuals, professionals and activists, and long-time dissidents like Manuel Cuesta Morúa, said it would reply soon to the government’s denial.
The government had not initially respond to their request, but later declared Nov. 20 as the National Defense Day and announced military exercises that day, a gesture that many interpreted as a threat of violence. The activists responded by changing the date of the march to Nov. 15, the day authorities announced they were lifting many COVID-19 restrictions.
“We made a peaceful call, and their answer was a military response,” said Trebol in a press conference via the Telegram messaging system last week. “Enough of the trampling of the rights of Cuban citizens.”
“Inside Cuba, they behave like an abusive, despotic Goliath, who crushes his own citizens, walks in military boots, and wants to crush every citizen who does not think like them,” he continued. “Within Cuba, they apply the supremacy of a single party and a single thought. And that has to end, enough of hypocrisy.”
His voice was suddenly cut off because the state telecommunications company blocked his internet and phone access and that of his relatives, he later explained during the conference.
“It doesn’t matter if they cut off the internet; we look for alternatives,” he said. “They always complain about the “blockade,” he said, referring to the U.S. embargo. “There is no worse blockade than the internal blockade on every Cuban citizen in this country.”
Where others have failed, the young activists believe they can succeed with the help of social media.
“It’s not that there were not similar actions before. We have the precedent of the Varela Project and other things dissidents did, but this can now be done with massive support,” Trebol told the Herald from Havana in an interview last week. “The use of social media has created a different reality.”
In 1998, prominent dissident Oswaldo Payá started gathering the 10,000 signatures needed to introduce amendments to the Cuban Constitution and enshrine economic and political freedoms. In addition, he proposed to hold a referendum so Cubans could decide about their future. But the initiative was crushed by Fidel Castro, who changed the Constitution to make socialism “irreversible,” with the stamped approval of the National Assembly, and imprisoned 75 opposition leaders in 2003. Payá died in a car crash in 2012 in unclear circumstances and his family believes it was a political assassination.
But many years later, the country and the Cuban people have changed in significant ways. Many Cubans are increasingly exhausted and frustrated with widespread shortages, rising inflation, and a dollarized economy that again leaves vast swaths of the population without access to essential goods. The COVID pandemic has shown the health system was severely underfunded, shattering one of the last myths of the Cuban revolution. Increasingly, the population is blaming the Miguel Díaz-Canel government for what they perceive are its failures, from messing up currency unification to responding late to the low supply of medical oxygen in the country amid the worst of the pandemic.
On July 11, hundreds of Cubans took to the streets to ask for regime change and voice their discontent. But the anti-government protests that happened across the country could not have happened without social media, which has provided a space to debate and denounce the government repression and a means of mobilization.
On social media, Cubans are entering one-on-one conversations that were impossible before these technologies in and out of the island. A Twitter space hosted by activist and entrepreneur Saily González, a member of Archipiélago, has become a place where Cubans emigres and Latin Americans ask questions of those on the island and make suggestions on a range of topics related to peaceful demonstrations, opposition tactics, and how in general to continue the momentum created by the July 11 demonstrations.
Reflecting on what was different this time, a Twitter user said it’s the numbers, the idea that many young Cubans were willing to support each other: “it didn’t make sense to do it before because one person cannot do much.”
But just as the Proyecto Varela in its time, the call for a demonstration ahead of time — and after notifying the government — has its detractors, especially among Cuban exiles. The idea has sparked a similar debate that divided Venezuelans regarding the opposition’s s dialogue with Nicolás Maduro’s regime. Accusations against the organizers of being “collaborators” with the Cuban government are already flying across the Florida Straits.
Some Cuban exiles oppose the idea because they believe asking for authorization equals a dialogue with a dictatorship. If Cuban authorities authorize the demonstrations, they say, that would only help them to save face.
Critics have labeled the organizers as leftists pseudo-intellectuals, but Archipiélago members believe it is precisely the left that has abandoned the protesters.
“I am calling on the left worldwide, which is usually complicit and unfortunately usually behaves in a hypocritical way, to tell them that there are no left or right dictatorships, good or bad, there are dictatorships, and we must oppose them all, whatever their political sign,” Trebol said.
In an interview, Trebol said he was aware that Cubans living in the U.S. did not need convincing that a dictatorship rules the country but that “there is a good part of the world that has a romantic idea about what Cuba means in their imagination built from propaganda.”
He said he was dismayed that many abroad believed the government’s version that the protests were violent.
“Now, no one would believe them because we are going public ahead of time, making it clear we are behaving in a civil way,” he said. “Far from any violence, we have decided to take action, and that action is by peaceful, civic means.”
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