Liuba Álvarez leaves her house three times a week at 3.45am to queue outside her local supermarket for basic goods like meat, oil and detergent. Her last queue was “relatively short”: after eight hours she came home with some minced meat in time for lunch. Other days she doesn’t get back until 5pm.
“It’s exhausting,” says Álvarez, 47. “Getting up early gives me migraines, but it’s the only way I can get these products to feed my children.”
Cubans are used to queues. But since the pandemic, endless lines,squeezed salaries and power cuts have become a grinding reality for millions. And on Sunday tensions boiled over in the largest anti-government protests for decades. Social media, the pandemic, and beefed-up US sanctions combined with a younger generation hungry for higher living standards have made for a dangerous cocktail the ruling Communist party is struggling to contend with.
“Cubans need cigarettes, coffee and food to be happy,” said Rey Alonso, 41, in central Havana on Tuesday. “Four years ago we had all that – you could go out and buy a can of cola. Now everything’s gone. Of course people took to the street!”
Covid surge
Cuba has one of the lowest Covid mortality rates in the region, with fewer than 2,000 dying from the disease since the pandemic began. But the island, which hospitalises everybody who tests positive for the virus, has been hit hard by new variants: on Saturday Cuba registered a record 6,923 new infections. #SOSCuba was trending on Facebook after hospitals in the western city of Matanzas were so overwhelmed they put beds with patients in corridors. Rising case numbers have increased anxiety in the population.
Developing its own Covid vaccines has been the state’s number one priority, and 10% of Cubans have so far been vaccinated. But ploughing money into vaccine production has left the cash-strapped state with scant funds to import other essential medicines, and pharmacy shelves are barren.
Trump sanctions still in place
The US secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, on Monday criticized the Cuban regime for “failing to meet people’s most basic needs, including food and medicine”. Yet for decades, US policies have explicitly been designed to create such shortfalls. (When first contemplating sanctions, President Dwight Eisenhower surmised that “If they [the Cuban people] are hungry, they will throw Castro out.”)
Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against the island curtailed foreign exchange inflows: flights to the island were cut back, cruise ships were banned, remittances were cancelled and US firms were allowed to sue multinationals investing in Cuba. The objective, the then secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, reportedly told diplomats, was to “starve” the country.
Then the pandemic hit, which gutted tourism – one of Cuba’s last sources of foreign revenue.
The state’s response to shrinking revenue was to grudgingly open dollar stores – a move which proved deeply unpopular as it vividly embodied the divide between the haves with access to foreign currency and the have-nots. On Sunday, dollar stores across the country were ransacked.
Although he was vice-president during Barack Obama’s rapprochement with Havana, Joe Biden has not rescinded any of the Trump sanctions. After losing Florida in 2020 – in part because more than 60% of Cuban Americans in south Florida voted Trump – the Biden administration is cautious about doing anything that will alienate this voting bloc.
Online activism
Cuba launched mobile internet late, in 2018, but more than 4 million people now access the web via their phones.
The internet – and particularly social media – has altered the power balance between citizens and state. After hundreds of people came out in the western town of San Antonio de los Baños on Sunday morning, videos were viewed by people in Havana within minutes.
The approximately $20m a year of US federal funds spent on “democracy promotion” factors into the way Cubans experience the internet.
Anti-Castro news websites funded by US tax dollars advertise heavily on Facebook and YouTube . VPNs are needed to make purchases with credit cards in Cuba, and to download many apps. When using the popular VPN Psiphon, for example, adverts for Cubanet, ADN Cuba and Diario de Cuba – all financed by the state department – pop up as paid content.
Articles from these outlets are overwhelmingly negative, adding to the sense of doom, gloom and hopelessness which formed the backdrop to Sunday’s protests.
In recent years internet access to dissident blogs and US government-funded news websites was blocked in Cuba, but major international news websites were available. Since Sunday evening the internet has been cut across the island.
Hunger for change
Politically, Cuba is marked by a stark generational divide: older generations – who lived through an era in which healthcare, literacy and access to culture improved greatly – tend to support the government; but those born after the fall of the Soviet Union have grown up amid scarcity and privation – and are more likely to oppose it.
This younger, less pliant generation is often uninterested in the external causes of the island’s plight (many are riled by mention of the “US blockade” which they see as an excuse and, sometimes, a sham). Blame for a system failing to provide for their needs is put squarely on the government.
This generational cleavage was clear on Sunday: anti-regime protesters were overwhelmingly young; pro-government protesters tended to be older.
Claudia Genlui Hidalgo, a 30-year-old member of the Movimiento San Isidro, a collective of artists opposed to curbs on artistic freedoms, said that the fact that the protests were spontaneous rather than organised indicated the level of discontent in Cuban society. “Cubans need a change for the better,” she said “I’d like to live in a democratic society where power is not so centralised.”