Cuba Protests Highlight Backlash Against Communist Regime

On March 17, mass numbers of protestors took to the streets in Cuba, sending the country’s communist government into a panic. While the media has largely cast these demonstrations as merely over food and electricity shortages, in fact they reflect a much deeper and growing resentment over the failures of Cuba’s socialist system.

The protests notably come following a period of increasing persecution from the Cuban government and a crackdown on dissidents. In late February, the regime rejected the appeal of 34 families to release political prisoners who in some cases have been held for years without trial.

The Cuban Observatory for Human rights, a group that monitors persecutions from Havana, also counted at least 95 arbitrary arrests and 282 repressive actions in February. In total the group has documented “more than 600 repressive actions” since the start of 2024.

Prisoners Defenders, another watchdog group, released an additional report last month which found that at least 150 children under 16 are currently being detained in Cuban prisons for political reasons. As of February 1, the group counted 1,066 political prisoners jailed in 300 detention facilities throughout the country.

Many of these prisoners are facing severe sentences for opposing the regime. In total, Havana’s courts issued 170 long-term sentences from February 2023 to January 2024.

Father Eustorgio, a Catholic missionary priest who spent nearly 20 years in Cuba acting as an informal chaplain before being forced to leave recently, told me that in some cases three generations of families have been imprisoned for acts of political disobedience.

“Nearly half of the current prisoners are victims of the terror launched after the 2021 protests,” he told me. “Some are children and grandchildren of those sentenced in the late 1990s and still held in prisons.”

The Cuban government has stepped up its enforcement against two opposition groups in particular, the Christian Liberation Movement and the Ladies in White. In early March, at least 17 activists from the Ladies in White movement were detained when they peacefully walked to churches in Havana and Santa Clara. The leader of the group, Berta Soler, told Radio Martí that some women needed medical attention after the police beat them.

Earlier this year, the Cuban secret police also arrested and intimidated Iran Almaguer, the brother of prisoner Yandier García Labrada, a member of the Christian Liberation Movement who was unjustly sentenced to five years in prison.

Jose Daniel Ferrer, the leader of the opposition group UNPACU, also remains captive in a Cuban prison where he reportedly undergoes regular torture sessions. He has been denied his legal right to see his wife and family.

Former political prisoner Rosa Maria Rodríguez Gil has warned that prisoners lack basic hygiene items and medicines and that they are dying of hunger. “I raise my voice on behalf of mothers whose unjustly imprisoned children receive old bread for breakfast and a spoon of rice for lunch while they are suffering illnesses deprived of medical aid,” she said.

The most recent round of protests should be viewed in the context of this campaign of repression. While the economic crisis gripping the island nation has heightened tensions, those tensions first arose as a result of political persecution and the failures of Cuba’s communist system.

“The common myth says that the U.S. embargo is the reason for the economic crisis, but this is false,” Dr. Cayetano Muñoz, a former advisor on Latin America affairs to Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, told me. “The stream of funds from the Soviet Union allowed them to hold up the socialist centralized, planned economy that was damned to crash, as happened everywhere else… Now, without this influx of money, which is the reason of the crisis, not the U.S. embargo, they can see the consequences of this erroneous system.”

The recent protests have caused the Cuban government to lash out at the Biden administration, even suggesting that the U.S. government is the one instigating the protests. Cuban Vice Minister of Foreign Relations Carlos Fernández de Cossío has specifically cited “the interventionist conduct and slanderous messages of the United States government and its embassy in Cuba regarding internal affairs of the Cuban reality.”

The State Department has pushed back against these accusations, with spokesman Vedant Patel telling reporters that “the United States is not behind these protests in Cuba, and the accusation of that is absurd.”

Indeed, far from working to undermine the Cuban regime, the Biden administration has seemed to only further cement its power. Father Eustorgio told me that Biden’s approach to Cuba has “emboldened the regime.”

Despite Biden keeping in place some stringent policies of the Trump administration, he has also offered several major concessions without extracting anything from Havana, sending the message that the Cuban government can get away with more oppression.

One Cuban opposition member with whom I spoke, who asked to only be identified as Osbaldo, told me that the Cuban people felt “the winds of freedom” were blowing under President Trump, but that this progress has been reversed under Biden. “We regained strength under Trump, but his successor turned his back on us and our friends in prisons,” Osbaldo lamented.

The March 17 protests have shown that the Cuban regime could be at a historically weak moment. But without a strong leader in the White House to capitalize on the momentum created by the protestors, the Cuban people may miss their chance for freedom.

Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.