Jose Garcia (1,710 posts)
Cubans take to the streets for the biggest anti-government protests in decades
Source: Washington Post
MIAMI — Communist Cuba erupted in its largest-scale demonstrations in decades on Sunday as thousands of people chanting “freedom” and “yes, we can” took to the streets from Havana to Santiago de Cuba in a major new challenge to an authoritarian government struggling to cope with increasingly severe blackouts, food shortages and a spiking coronavirus outbreak.
The protests, from Havana’s famous Malecon to the island nation’s eastern cities, spoke to the power of social media. They apparently started in the city of San Antonio de los Baños and spread rapidly as demonstrators shared their protests on Facebook Live. The demonstrations were so large that President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who succeeded Raúl Castro this year as first secretary of the Communist Party, called on Cuba’s “revolutionary” citizens to take to the streets.
“We are prepared to do anything,” he said in a national address. "We will be battling in the streets.” He blamed the United States for agitating the population.
José Miguel Vivanco, director of Human Rights Watch’s Americas division, said his group had received reports that at least 20 people had been arrested. He added that the organization had received reports of violence being used by Cuban forces, a claim echoed by social media users sharing videos of wounded protesters.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/11/cuba-protests/?outputType=amp
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The Biden Administration Says the Demonstrations are Due to an Inflammatory Video Cubans Seeking COVID Vaccinations jcmaine72 (1,432 posts)
1. I suspect these "spontaneous protests" are being organized and funded
by one of the countless extreme RW hate groups in S. Florida.
The Cuban people have been dealing with their own version of Trumpanzee insurrectionists long before the real Donald Trump grabbed his first P***y.
Yeah, life in the paradise known as Cuba, where they still drive cars from the 50's and internet is for Party cronies only, is always being upended by Republicans. Sure.
Star Member Warpy (100,929 posts)
2. Not necessarily
50 years of an embargo that outlived any usefulness decades ago has pretty much destroyed any hope their economy ever had. Younger Cubans want to leave, there is just not anything there for them any more.
We should have ended the embargo when the USSR fell, carrots working better than sticks, but Republicans were terrified of losing the Batista Cuban vote in Florida. Once their main trading partner, the USSR, was no more, a slow opening of trade could have been used as leverage to liberalize their system.
Even the Batista Cubans might have realized that making money was preferable to hanging onto an old grudge.
Wow, what a paradise: it can't even live without American dollars pouring in. What about EVERY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD and its investment in Cuba? And the USSR was a trading partner like a meth whore is a "trading partner" of a guy who cooks meth in mountain dew bottles.
Star Member Judi Lynn (148,293 posts)
7. The right-wing reactionary racist elites who were the first wave to run to Miami
were the big fish in the small bowl against whom the Cuban masses revolted, they comprised the very large landowners, the industrialists, the enormous sugar barons, the people with United Fruit (later Chiquita), the ones who owned and controlled everything, even the death squads, like Batista pal and newspaper owner, and rancher, Rolando Masferrer owned the "Masferrer's Tigers" death squad, roaming the streets in cars, kidnapping, torturing, murdering leftist dissidents, even dismembering their bodies and hanging them from trees as they did in Santiago de Cuba.
The US rightwing citizens who continue to pass around disinformation about Cuba and its history are either deliberately attempting to keep fellow idiots in the dark, or they are simply ignorant, and too lazy to start finding out what actually has happened OVER THE YEARS by researching, talking to people, asking questions, LISTENING, and breaking down and expending some energy trying to READ, to study, to research, for christ's sakes.
No time like the present to wake up.
Thank you very much for your sane, intelligent post. ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
FOAD, Judi Lynn. I don't see you whining too much about Venezuela, which is what Cuba always has been under commie rule.
Star Member HUAJIAO (1,148 posts)
11. Why start the article with, "Communist Cuba ...?"
They don't start with "Capitalist Portugal."
Ummm...because communism is the problem? How about that?
malaise and her love of the Cuban people's dental care (seriously...it's weird) has yet to weigh in.
