Protests in Havana

 

The Left is presently in an embarrassing situation that they are required to defend the Cuban government's crackdown on the protests currently taking place on the island. 

Despite their praise for its healthcare and welfare system, the "progressives" are reluctant to accept that Cuba regardless of its claims is little different from any other capitalist country and the effect of the pandemic has shown this. Rallies against the government's policies and the lack of action to mitigate the economic consequences of Covid have taken place in at least 48 separate locations, including Havana.

Our fellow workers in Cuba are just protesting against the actual social and economical conditions as they would in any other capitalist country around the world.

 At least 140 demonstrators are believed to have been detained.

“The idea is to punish those who dare to challenge the government … and send a message” that no further protests would be tolerated, said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s Americas director.

The media are making a big deal out of those protests which appear to be identical to many of the anti-lockdown demonstrations we have seen everywhere because of the enforced economic hardships of the pandemic. And the anti-government slogans .."freedom" and "down with dictatorship" are the same as heard in the anti-Covid restrictions in the streets of many other cities.

Are they the signs of something more serious? Perhaps they might be the start of something. But for the moment we cannot be sure if this is purely a pandemic phenomenon or something more fundamental and radical. Perhaps it might be the beginning of future protests against Cuba's ruling elite,

But we cannot rely on the media to tell us for real. And most definitely we can not rely upon Biden’s and hypocritical support for the demonstrations as any genuine concern.

As for the left-wingers,  they just see it as a problem between imperialists and anti-imperialist and repeat parrot-fashion  Cuba's president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, accusations that much of the dissent is incited by the USA and any difficulty is due to the US blockade, the latter we can concede is an obstacle while the former is the usual diversion for any despotic regime - blame foreign interference.