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“Those supposed trucks that arrived do not mean that they are going to start selling rice, sugar or milk to the population. They are only now distributing the rice and sugar of the month that has not arrived, the milk of the children that they have not given,” says a Cuban resident in Santiago de Cuba who asked to remain anonymous. Otherwise, she says that everything is calm. “Everything is quiet here, as usual,” she says. “They knocked down the current last night and, with darkness in the streets, there was no choice but to gather.” She also says that the city has been guarded this Monday by several police patrols and state security agents.
Military deployment and arrests due to discontent
Until the early hours of March 18, replicas of the street protests were recorded in several municipalities in the country. In Bayamo, one of the cities with the most historical weight, where the national anthem was born and whose inhabitants set it on fire as a form of resistance against the Spanish occupation, the Cubans came out to sing, and the Government responded with repression. Several videos show police officers beating citizens who were running to avoid being arrested, and the deployment of soldiers from the Special Forces (Black Wasps) to quell the demonstrations.
Almost at midnight on Sunday, the town of Cárdenas, in the west of the island, had already joined the protests, ringing pots and pans and in the middle of a blackout that lasted several hours. Several young people and mothers with children in their arms walked through the Santa Marta neighborhood while also taking to the streets in Alquízar and San Antonio de los Baños. Outside the country, Cuban exiles demonstrated together from the legendary Versailles restaurant in Miami to the headquarters of the Cuban embassy in Montevideo, Uruguay.
The day has remembered the historic protests of July 11 and 12, 2021 throughout Cuba, where thousands of Cubans took to the streets, the first of that magnitude since the triumph of the Revolution.
As happened three years ago, the Cuban government resorted to police repression to quell the protests. Organizations that independently record detainee numbers in Cuba have found it difficult to document all arrests. The groups Cubalex and Justicia 11J have been able to confirm the identity of at least four people who were detained in a “violent” manner, some of them with unknown whereabouts.
On Sunday, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged on the authorities was to “attend to the complaints” of the people. This Monday, the president blamed the “mediocre politicians and terrorists” of South Florida for being responsible for “heating up the streets of Cuba.” He then added: “They were left wanting,” boasting about the effective way they had to stop the demonstrations in the country.
Along the same lines, Vice Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío said that the protests were a “desperate attempt by the United States to destabilize Cuba.” From the Government, that is the justification that the Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodríguez, has also given, who stated that if the United States “was concerned about the well-being of the Cuban people” it would lift the economic “blockade” and “remove Cuba from the list of supposed sponsors of terrorism.”
But although the protesters who took to the streets on Sunday ended up shouting “freedom”, the first demands of the protests began being for “food” and “current”, at a time when even the Government itself has had to recognize the economic crisis. that the country is going through, only compared to that of the beginning of the nineties, during the special period. Today, Cubans suffer from long hours without electricity, low food supplies, and lack of medical supplies, a situation that only seems to get worse.
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