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“President Joe Biden on Monday called protests in Cuba ‘remarkable’ and a ‘clarion call for freedom,’ praising thousands of Cubans who took the streets to protest food shortages and high prices amid the coronavirus crisis — one of the island’s biggest antigovernment demonstrations in recent memory.” AP News
Both sides support the protesters and condemn the Cuban regime:
“This is no small act for a people who for generations policed their own actions and words out of fear — of being detained or imprisoned, losing their jobs or homes, getting harassed. Beyond a tiny circle, no one could be trusted with the truth that so many tucked deep inside their hearts — that equality and shared prosperity never existed in Cuba. The system operates by caging people in and breaking them down in the name of communist orthodoxy and self-preservation…
“Where this eruption of anger, desperation and passion will lead, I don’t know. The Cuban government has mastered the art of snuffing out protest. But it’s hard not to hope this marks the start of a long-overdue revolution. The thousands who took to the streets, knowing what they were up against, delivered a loud, clear message to the regime and to the world.”
Lizette Alvarez, Washington Post
“For more than 60 years, Cubans have been fleeing their beautiful island for the safety and opportunity of the United States because they have been deprived of them in their homeland. When Fidel Castro took power in 1959, he promised them prosperity, equality, and freedom. He gave them the opposite. The regime he founded has only ever presided over a stultifying command economy that has kept Cubans poor, all the while operating a brutal police state that murders or throws dissenters in prison. Castro and his cronies made out like bandits. At the time of his death in 2016, the dictator was estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The Editors, National Review
A local journalist writes, “We Cubans can’t stand this regime anymore, and our frustration is boiling over. A country with severe shortages of food and medicine, with a collapsed health care system under covid-19, plus power outages and increased political repression, has finally exploded. And this just compounds decades of mismanagement and authoritarianism…
“The protests happened spontaneously, something this inept government can’t hide. Cubans have moved on from complaining in whispers inside their own houses and nodding in disapproval in the streets to taking real action. The protests have shaken up the regime. I don’t think things will be the same in Cuba anymore: The game has changed, and a new set of rules could change our future.”
Abraham Jiménez Enoa, Washington Post
Other opinions below.
“The Administration's challenge is to back up [Biden’s] words with real support for the liberation of this long-suffering nation. Step one is not to return to the failed appeasement of Barack Obama that expanded U.S. travel and commerce with the island but achieved nothing in political or economic reform. The regime is more vulnerable since Donald Trump restored some U.S. sanctions, and its allies in Venezuela can no longer provide much oil to keep the lights on and the military well-fed…
“The U.S. can tighten the financial squeeze and impose Magnitsky sanctions on Cuba’s human-rights violators. Helping protesters foil Cuba’s internet shutdown would be invaluable, and a warning to Russia and China not to meddle by propping up the regime is warranted. The odds on a freedom revolution may be long, but the Cuban people need to hear loud and clear that America is on their side, and not on the Communist regime’s.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“No one should think that the Cuban government wants a normal trading relationship with the U.S. The American embargo, which permits trade in food and medical supplies, is both a convenient excuse and an important policy tool for Havana. It’s an all-purpose rationalization for 60 years of economic failure (though the example of nearby Venezuela demonstrates that socialism can produce mass poverty and misery even without a U.S. embargo)…
“It also prevents regime loyalists’ greatest nightmare: a tidal wave of Cuban-American investment regenerating the Cuban economy, ending the resource monopoly that keeps the government in power…
“The question for Havana is whether this creaking system can still deliver goods to the hard-core supporters on whom Castro’s heirs depend. Are the snitches and thugs who form the backbone of Communist power willing to duke it out with the opposition for as long as it takes? So far, they have answered President Miguel Diaz-Canel’s call for ‘all the revolutionaries of the country, all the communists, to take to the streets.’ Will they persevere? With no tourism income, how happy is the military? And, in the last extremity, is it loyal enough to shoot protesters down in the streets?”
Walter Russell Mead, Wall Street Journal
“During his presidential campaign last year, Bernie Sanders wouldn’t back off his supportive statements about the Castro regime over the years — yes, the government should be less authoritarian, but it has done so much good. Filmmaker Michael Moore made a popular movie extolling the Cuban health-care system…
“The rationalizations offered for the regime are tinny and misleading. We are supposed to believe that Cuba was sunk in medieval illiteracy until enlightened Communists came to power who cared above all about social progress and just happened to jail, torture, and kill lots of people in the course of teaching kids to read…
“The economic historian Brad DeLong has noted that Cuba in 1957 had lower infant mortality than many European countries, more doctors and nurses per capita than Britain or Finland, and as many vehicles per capita as Italy or Portugal. After decades of Castro’s dictatorship, its per capita GDP ranks with Mongolia and Bhutan, according to CIA figures. This suggests, correctly, that Castro took over a country in pretty good shape and wrecked it, rather than the other way around.”
Rich Lowry, New York Post
“Fidel Castro’s revolution has become a tropical dystopia… President Biden was correct on Monday to issue a restrained statement repeating support for the Cuban people and their desire for freedom. He should consider actions to ease the humanitarian crisis, such as reversing Trump-era restrictions on remittances. Above all, Cubans should know that the outside world is watching with admiration as they attempt to shape their own destiny.”
Editorial Board, Washington Post
“The United States should not just ‘take action’ [as Miami mayor Francis Suarez implored]—especially if ‘action’ means violently interfering in Cuban affairs or trying to foment potentially catastrophic regime change, as administrations have done going back to Dwight Eisenhower. The simplest, and perhaps the most politically savvy, path forward would be to drop the long-standing U.S. trade embargo, eliminate sanctions, and ensure that any incipient protest movement remains organic, indigenous, and untainted by American association…
“The notion that we might not Do! Something! is antithetical to a deeply ingrained ideology that casts our shock troops as M16-toting bearers of democracy. Accusations of ‘isolationism’ and capitulation to communism will surely follow in the wake of opting out of some blundering, heavy-handed approach. But a mature nation knows when restraint is the better and more effective course and doesn’t regard every problem as deserving of a military response…
“If the Biden administration hopes to carve out a new, post–war on terror philosophy governing America’s engagement with the world, it should be premised as much on quiet diplomacy—and perhaps the occasional mealy-mouthed statement—as on revving the engine of empire.”
Jacob Silverman, New Republic
“To see what kind of government US meddling would produce, look at neighboring Haiti, whose president the US Marines removed in 2004. Anyone who believes US intervention in Cuba would bring about a stable, prosperous liberal democracy first needs to explain why Haiti is wracked by dystopian levels of poverty, inequality, corruption, and political violence… If the US government truly wanted to help the Cuban people, there’s an easy and obvious way: end the sanctions…
“Right-wing anti-communists often want to have it both ways. On the one hand, they deny that the embargo is a significant contributing factor to hardships in Cuba — arguing that the shortages are almost entirely caused by the flaws in Cuba’s system…
“On the other hand, they insist that it’s essential the embargo stay in place. But why? If it really has no major effect on Cuba’s economy, how could it be an important tool to pressure the Cuban government to meet US demands? If it really isn’t exacerbating the island’s economic problems, why not prove that by normalizing trade relations? Last month, the United Nations voted overwhelmingly to call on the United States to lift the embargo… It’s time to listen to the world’s condemnation. The embargo needs to end.”
Ben Burgis, Jacobin Magazine
“If the protests boil over and even topple the post-Castro regime in Cuba, US supporters of a hardline approach -- seeking their own political dividend -- will surely claim that choking the island's economy delivered. Then again, 60 years is a heck of a long time to wait for a policy to work.”
Stephen Collinson, CNN
