July 11, point of no return
I don’t think anyone can predict the exact moment when a pressure cooker is going to explode. Sunday, July 11, seemed like any other bad day for Cubans. Up to the door of my house came the usual shouts of the hundreds of people who every morning gather around the Galerías Paseo store to try to buy a couple of days of rationed survival. Internet was taken over by a burst beautiful of the support networks that under the call of # SOSCuba , is articulated from within and outside the country to highlight and help the health crisis begins to face a nation whose hospital system is at the door of the collapse as a result of the rampant increase in infections by Covid-19.
Then, San Antonio de los Baños. A small town located just over thirty kilometers from the capital was the first spark. Hundreds of people took to the streets to demand the government a way out of the difficult situation that the population has been living for years, between material shortages of all kinds and restrictive sanitary measures maintained for more than a year. Then Palma Soriano, and Centro Habana , and Trinidad, to add more than forty municipalities in which the street was taken by the discontent of those who can not take it anymore.
Faced with this unprecedented situation, the Cuban government, as stunned as anyone, decided to exhaust the opportunity — perhaps its last chance — to manage the crisis in the worst possible way. It responded to popular demands with outdated rhetoric in which he blamed “provocations” — not protests — for being promoted by opposition groups influenced by the United States government. Some of this there is , of course, but hunger, hardship and fatigue accumulated by the lack of response by the Cuban state is too real to want to blame outsiders for the situation in which we find ourselves today.
This stale speech was accompanied by a display of police, military, and pro-government groups who — in keeping with the nefarious slogan of “the order to fight is given, the revolutionaries are out on the street,” delivered by President Miguel Díaz-Canel — came out repress the protesters with a degree of violence such as can only occur when fear is mixed with the absence of one’s own thought.
The images are bleak; between disgusted and fascinated, I could not stop watching on Twitter the videos and photos that show the marches in the neighborhoods, the clashes between those who protested and the repressive forces of the state, and the excessive violence with which the alleged forces of order attacked peaceful demonstrations.
Then came the partial shutdown of Internet. Internet that has been an essential tool for the mobilization and organization of Cuban civil society in recent years, and that in situations like this is a basic resource to keep informed in a more or less truthful way — because state media is installed post-truth, and an alternate reality takes place there.
While the government and state media ignore the just demand of the demonstrations, and its Newspeak call revolutionaries to defend the conquests of the Revolution, for Internet circulate videos of beating people and lists of arrested persons whose whereabouts are unknown , those who manage to connect need to activate the VPNs to be able to access something similar to the information, from the outside people try uselessly to communicate with their relatives, and the tide of anger, fatigue and frustration that began to rise continues to grow unstoppable last Sunday and that will continue to beat.
In such a turbulent scenario, any way out that the government tries should be based on non-violence and avoid the confrontational discourse that will only deepen the divisions. If not out of genuine good faith , at least out of a basic sense of politics. In a true socialist state of law, protest is not criminalized. They must apologize for the mistakes made and listen to the people, who are the legitimate sovereign. Unfortunately none of that has happened here.
Governing in a democracy is not holding a scepter and preventing someone from taking it away, but managing dissent and finding solutions to problems that satisfy the majority. In their denial of reality, the Cuban rulers have turned their backs on the people and have entrenched themselves in their puffed-up story. The consequences of such an attitude are usually disastrous because, once the dam is broken, the reaction ends up destroying everything in its path, even the good and the just that could have been before.
I am isolated at home as a second-degree contact for a Covid-19 patient. The unstable Internet is pretty much my only way to learn from what is happening. I have no absolute certainty of what happens beyond my front door. I only know that today I woke up again with the shouts of the people in the line at Galerías Paseo. And that something was irretrievably broken on July 11.
(Originally published in Spanish on Vozpópuli)
