Cuban citizens residing in Ecuador demonstrate against the government of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel on July 13, 2021, in front of the Cuban Embassy in Quito. Cristina Vega Rhor/AFP via Getty Images
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and China and Vietnam’s move to lose forms of state capitalism, Cuba remains a rare contemporary example of Marxist-Leninist central planning. However, popular confidence in the Partido Communista de Cuba (PCC), the island’s centralised ruling party, appears to have crumbled, with public dissent and protestation over widespread shortages of food, electricity and medicine raging in the island since early July.
The success and longevity of the communist state is broadly predicated on the ability of the centralised party to satisfy the basic needs of the population. With the regime unable to service such needs, the Castro-era ‘social contract’ that held the nation together post-revolution has broken down. No doubt accelerated by a clumsily managed pandemic response, the protests appear to be a reactionary symptom of decades of economic repression and inefficiency.
Cuba’s protests centre around widespread shortages of necessity consumer goods and foodstuffs. Cuba has a historically weak agricultural sector. Stunted by lasting fuel and fertilizer shortages in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, who had provided 90% of Cuba’s fuel and fertiliser supplies and sheltered Cuba’s sugar exports with heavy subsidies for nearly three decades, it struggles to feed the island’s 11 million inhabitants. The government is thus constrained into importing food with scarce hard currency – Cuba’s monopolistic retail model with its state-run grocery stores are stocked almost-solely with imported produce, with US-Cuba agricultural imports up 64.9% year-on-year in 2021. The state’s reliance on imported produce, denominated in USD, has exacerbated income inequality, lead to a proliferation of food shortages and placed heightened pressure on Cuba’s tourism industry as a source of hard currency. Tips and currency inflows from tourists became scarce as the pandemic decimated Cuba’s salient tourism industry, with a 91% drop in visitor numbers year-on year in 2021.
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While systematic economic maladministration may be to blame for Cuba’s current social and economic fragility, the regime has squarely blamed the US for raging social unrest. President Miguel Diez-Canel, the product of the 2020 departure from the politburo of the survivors of 1959 revolution that thrust the Castro brothers into control, identified the US embargo as the root cause, claiming that US ‘politics of economic asphyxiation’ were having a ‘cumulative impact’ on the Cuban economy.
While pointing blame for popular unrest on the US may appear simply a tactic to detract attention from the Havana regime’s shortcomings, it is true that US technology has facilitated the protests. With a state monopoly over internet service provision, Cubans have experienced frequent internet shutdowns and the banning of social media platforms since the start of widespread protests in early July. Given the leaderless, grassroots nature of the protests, internet access is integral to co-ordinate and instigate public assembly. Many rely on US-based VPN services to hide their identity and give access to outlawed social media platforms and messaging services, notably Facebook-owned WhatsApp, which crucially allows encrypted messaging.
US foreign policy has historically recognised the importance of internet freedom in the instance of protest. In 2010 Hilary Clinton, as Secretary of State, condemned the internet shutdowns in response to the early stages of the Arab Spring. Similarly, the Biden administration has been in talks with private internet service providersto provide Cubans with uncensored internet access with the use of airborne phone towers, reinforcing the Trump administration’s frigid attitude towards the regime in Havana (8). Given the precarious nature of Cuba’s political and economic landscape, US foreign policy geared towards allowing citizens to circumvent authoritarian online red tape, facilitating public assembly and organised protest, may work in tandem with the existing economic blockade to further destabilise the already-shaky foundation of the regime.
With Havana limited in its ability to quell protest past the employment of brute force, the survival of Castro’s legacy system likely rests on the voracity and longevity of popular protest.
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