Cubanet, Luis Cino, Havana, 27 March 2024 — More than a few Cubans in exile are skeptical about the scope and effectiveness of the current protests by the Cuban population. They belittle them, arguing (in agreement with the official narrative) that the demonstrations are only about food and electricity, and that to calm them down will take only bestowing a little rice and beans from the state reserves, reducing the blackouts a little, blasting some reggaeton from loudspeakers, and hauling in the kegs to dispense beer on tap.
Many who think this way are disgusted and scared when they see protesters in flip-flops, the men without shirts, yelling vulgarities and expletives against Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel. They cannot conceal their elitism and contempt for what they consider to be easily-manipulated mobs of hungry rabble, politically illiterate. Thus, they betray a dissociation from reality and an arrogance as great as that of the leaders of the Castro succession.
If it is true that six decades of dictatorship have eroded societal values and civic sensibilities, and managed to keep many Cubans in a state of confusion and degradation, the populace overall has had enough of so much misery and oppression, and will not be meekly herded back into the fold.
The women and men who took the streets to protest are demanding freedom, because that is what they need to live with dignity–not only food, water, and electricity, as those trickster-bosses who try to hide the will of the people would have us believe.
There is room for agreement with those who speak of the need–now and in the future, if we aspire to democracy and not banana-republic anarchy–for the protesters to have leaders who can present a coherent political program as an alternative to the regime. But we cannot look down on those who, since July 11, 2021 (11J), in their own way and within their range of possibility, have been resisting the government with demands that, within a totalitarian state, inevitably become political.
The sum total of protests documented since 2021 by the Cu
