Front Burner - What’s behind Cuba’s protest movement

Episode Date: July 19, 2021

Cuba’s historic protests — and the government crackdown that followed — have shone a new light on the crisis currently facing the island. But questions about how to fix that crisis, and who’s to blame, are hotly disputed. Journalist Ed Augustin on what the protesters want, and how Cuba got to this point.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. The historic protests that exploded across Cuba a week ago and the government crackdown that followed have placed a new spotlight on the dire circumstances facing people on the island right now

and how much worse things have gotten during the pandemic. An economic crisis has hit the island nation hard, forcing people to wait hours in line for food and job opportunities. These protests have cranked up the pressure on both the Cuban government and the U.S. Biden administration to fix things. But while people on all sides seem to agree that change is needed, the questions of what that change looks like and who's to blame for the current crisis are both hotly disputed. Today, I'm speaking with Havana-based journalist Ed Augustin about what the protesters want and how things got to this point. Hi, Ed. Thank you so much for making the time today.

Thank you. So what is the situation in Cuba like today? The situation in Cuba is calm at the moment. There have been no protests against the government today so far, nor for most of the week. And that is due to, in part, an expanded police presence throughout the capital. And also, I think one factor has been that the government limited the internet after last Sunday's historic protest, where thousands of people protested against the government, both in Havana and also across the country. So right now, for almost the last week, the streets in Havana have been calm.

A tense calm. It's, of course, talk of the town. Many people upset with the beatings we saw, with batons. Or people simply coming out on the street, many of them, to protest for their rights. Protesters say they're fed up with the country's economic crisis, curbs on civil liberties and the handling of the coronavirus pandemic. What do we know about how many people are still detained? There haven't been precise numbers given by the government, but opposition activists have been compiling their own lists. And the estimates I'm getting is that it's in the region of 200

to 250 people who are currently detained. They punched him hard and took him away for no reason. Yesterday I went to the police and they didn't want to help anyone. They just said, see you tomorrow. They don't care and we don't know where my brother is. And I wonder about journalists as well. What's been happening to them? Yeah, I know a few journalists that were detained. The way it tends to work in Cuba now is different to how it was when, for example, Fidel Castro was in power. So when Fidel Castro was in power, it was very, very normal for people

to be detained for years and years, including opposition activists and journalists. Since Raul Castro took over in 2006, there was a change in strategy. So people were detained for shorter periods of time. And that's what we're seeing even in these tumultuous moments. So most of the journalists that I'm in touch with were detained for a few days and released. That includes people on the left who are critical of the government, who are, for example, against the US embargo, but also don't think it's right that the government has been limiting, repressing these protests. And also people on the right. So a journalist I know who works for ABC newspaper was released. Sorry, she was arrested. There was international

condemnation. And a few days later, she was released. She is currently under house arrest. under house arrest. You mentioned these historic protests, and I wonder if you could put it into context for me. How unprecedented are these recent protests? These are the biggest protests against the government ever since the 1959 Cuban revolution. And these protests, like, I just wonder if you could describe them a little bit more for me, like who is out on the streets? And generally, what are they angry about? So in general, the social kind of composition of the protest was overwhelmingly young people, so people who are in their teens and 20s. And it's not too surprising, because the Cuban Revolution, when it happened in 1959, saw a huge expansion in living standards for the following decades. So people who are older now in their 80s and 70s saw the huge increase in

literacy, saw the huge increase in healthcare. Even today, infant mortality rates in Cuba are lower than they are in the United States of America. The average life expectancy in Cuba is 79 for a child born today. That's the same as in my native country, the United Kingdom. And so the older generation bore testimony to that. And they in large part remain loyal, if you want to use that word, to the revolution. They think it's a project worth defending. The younger generation, people who are millennials and in Generation Z, overwhelmingly have known privation. So since in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba lost its main benefactor and ally, and

living standards since then have really reduced. And so this younger generation for the last 30 years now, most of the Cuban revolution's life, have been used to long queues, promises that things will get better, but that have never materialized. And also increasing access to foreign tourists and the outside world. And they're better able to compare how they live with, for example, people in the United States, which is always a comparison that might seem like a false comparison, given that Cuba is a developing economy. But Cuba is very culturally American.

And so that's often the way in which people compare. So it's this younger generation that has predominantly been out on the streets or was out last Sunday. To what extent are they protesting, or are the protests about political repression? So in my reporting, I found that the main driver for the protests are economic privation. I mean, the queues for basic goods from soap to chicken to spaghetti in Havana right now are quite unbelievable. I met one person who was involved in the protests last Sunday. He gets up at the moment at 2am every single morning. He has to walk for an hour to get to the nearest supermarket where he thinks he can buy chicken. He sleeps

rough from three in the morning until nine when it opens, having to hide from police because there's a curfew in place to try and keep COVID down. And then after that, he's in a queue for the rest of the day. I bumped into him the other day. And and it was 12 o'clock there were over 300 people in front of him and he went home because he said look i'm not going to get in today and that's the sort of scarcity we're talking about and added to that we've had power cuts in some parts of the country so so just imagine after you queue for eight hours in a day you finally buy some chicken um you get home you put it in the fridge and there's a power cut until it goes off. I mean, there's one political analyst who described it to me.

That's enough to drive anyone to protest. We're here because of the repression of the people. They are starving us to death. Havana is collapsing. We have no homes, nothing. is starving us to death. Havana is collapsing. We have no homes, nothing.

I want to talk about what's causing that economic privation in just one moment. But is it fair to say that this is also about repression? I ask this question because you hear a lot of chants like down with the dictatorship. Yeah, I think definitely a major component of the protests are also political. So a lot of people have been shouting down with the dictatorship, down with DS Cannell, who's the country's president. But when you dig a little deeper in interviewing those people who do use political slogans, sure, many of them want multi-party elections, many of them don't want

communism. But if you ask why, the main reason that comes out is economic complaints, that communism for them equals power cuts, that communism for them equals standing in line. So it's really the privation that is driving this. And in many people's frame of understanding, they associate that with this political system that is the only thing they've known. So what is causing this very dire economic situation? So back in 2015 in Cuba, the Obama administration began to normalize relations between the US and Cuba. And that was a very, very popular move. It was very, very hard to find anybody who was against that. And unsurprisingly,

given the increased US investment, an avalanche of US tourists with their cash dollars coming, the Cuban economy grew and people's income started to grow. It was happy times. Fast forward now to 2021, and it's a very different picture. And two things have happened particularly. Number one, of course, the pandemic. Cuba, like all Caribbean countries, is highly dependent on tourism. And the pandemic coming along has pulled the rug from $3.2 billion that before went into the Cuban economy. But even bigger than that has been the US sanctions, right? So no country in known history has been sanctioned for longer than Cuba. Since the 1960s, the US has sanctioned Cuba. And the 1960s, the U.S. has sanctioned Cuba and the Obama administration softened those sanctions, but those sanctions have been tightened a lot by the Trump administration. The Trump administration put over 200 new sanctions on Cuba during its four-year term.

50 of those sanctions were applied during the pandemic. Today, as part of our continuing fight against communist oppression, I am announcing that the Treasury Department will prohibit U.S. travelers from staying at properties owned by the Cuban government. To take just one of those measures, remittances were canceled in the last days of the Trump administration. Remittances used to represent $3.5 billion, mainly for the Cuban people. That alone has had a bigger impact than the loss of tourism. And talking about the sanctions around remittances that you were talking about, like Western Union closed all 407 locations across Cuba in November. So I think just by totting up the simple numbers, you can see that those are the two main reasons that explain the economic

problems here. It's true that the Cuban economy is very, very inefficient. It's true that there is corruption. It's true that there is mismanagement. But the fact is that four years ago, living standards were improving. People had access to these basic goods now, pharmacy shelves. Yes, there were shortages, but you'd walk from one, two or three pharmacies and you'd find what you're looking for. That's not the case now. What happened? Trump sanctions, pandemic. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years.

I've talked to millions of people, and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cops.

I also just wanted to ask you a little bit about Cuba's response to the pandemic, because I do know they have had a very effective response in some ways. For example, they were putting everybody who got sick into the hospital, and they had such a low death rate. But how have efforts to get COVID under control factored into the crisis that we're seeing now as well? So throughout all of 2020, Cuba had a very, very good pandemic. Cuba is the country with the highest doctor to patient ratio in the world. And you had track and trace mechanisms where doctors, nurses, medical students, tens of

thousands of them knocked on people's doors pretty much every day, checking if they had symptoms for COVID. As you say, everybody in Cuba who tests positive is hospitalized. I think it's the only country in the Americas and the Western Hemisphere that does that. And as you'd expect, there's a lower death rate because of that, because all of those people are receiving medical attention. It's also worth pointing out that Cuba is the only country in Latin America to have come up with its own anti-COVID vaccines. It's got five of those, and it started to roll out those vaccines. Over 20% of the Cuban population is already fully vaccinated, mainly health workers and the population of Havana. However, in 2021, Cuba's had a very bad pandemic.

You look at figures right now, it's reminiscent of how things were in Europe and the US in the summer of 2020. And they're really struggling to get that under control. And many analysts, and I agree with that, think that this huge spike in COVID that the island hadn't yet seen, factored into the protest that we saw on Sunday, because in a country where people are used to a high level of medical attention, at least for a country in the global south, people are starting to get the impression that the medical system might be fraying, it's overwhelmed, people are talking about collapse. And I think that generalised anxiety has factored into a feeling that, wow, the government might be losing control.

In terms of the other ways that Cuba's COVID response has factored into this crisis, adding up the numbers, you can see that the inordinate amount of expenditure on trying to vaccinate their own population with their own vaccine leaves them with less money to import other very important medicines and other foodstuffs, the lack of which has driven in large part the protests we saw on Sunday. Okay. I guess the question I have is, given all of this, who or what institution are the protesters directing their anger and ire at? So Cuba's President Miguel Diaz-Can, has also said that this is about the U.S., that these protests are part of a U.S. plot to fracture the Cuban government because of the

sanctions. And so how have the protesters reacted to that? Who are they angry at? Well, the protesters against the government are certainly angry at the government. From their point of view, most of them, I think, it's the government's fault, plain and squarely, that they've got a quality of life that they're not happy with. I mean, in any protest, as you can imagine, with thousands of people, there are all sorts of views. So I know protesters that, one, blame the government for not allowing them to go on the streets and protest their civil and political rights they feel are being violated, but also people who feel that the US embargo is unjust and not to be lifted. But I think it's fair to say that by and large, those people that went out on the streets to protest would by and large put the blame on the government. It's worth pointing out that yesterday, there was a state organised rally to support the government. That was a mix of people who are instructed to go out and support the government from their workplaces, and also

people who support the Cuban revolution and think it's a project worth defending and those people are sticking with the government. Okay. On the note of the sanctions, President Biden, during his campaign, promised to lift them. I reversed the recent decision by Trump to limit the remittances of the Cuban family. And, of course, he was vice president when Barack Obama normalized relations with Cuba. But Biden still hasn't reversed Trump's policies. And so what do we know about why that is? I think the main reason why the Biden administration hasn't yet acted is that over 60 percent of

Cuban-Americans in South Florida voted for Trump. And the Biden administration is very, very scared of losing Florida. It lost Florida in the last presidential elections. And it's very, very scared to do anything that upsets them. And so we're seeing that Biden is not acting on Cuba and so forth de facto. He's keeping those Trump policies in place. There's been this campaign called SOS Cuba, largely led by artists inside and outside Cuba, calling on the government to open a humanitarian corridor to let aid in. And how has the government responded to this? The Cuban government is saying that this hashtag SOS Cuba thing is largely a regime change operation.

So they point to how similar SOS campaigns have happened in countries like Venezuela. And so they see this very much as part of the US playbook. The United States every year spends approximately $20 million on what they call democracy promotion, on what the Cuban government understands as regime change. And so some of that money makes it to interests outside that have been involved in operations like this. It's worth pointing out that back in 2014, Associated Press revealed that USAID, the US Agency for International Development, had funded and overseen an operation to create a Cuban Twitter called Zunzaneo, Hummingbird, as it's translated here. And the idea there, it was revealed in documents,

was to mobilize smart mobs. So the idea was to increase connectivity to Cuba, to have people be able to connect and to start creating a social media platform that would focus firstly on sports and celebrities. And then after they'd reached a significant number of people, tilt and pivot towards anti-regime content production. So the Cuban government is very, very aware that there's historical precedent for this and that there's tens of millions of dollars based on that. Having said that, many artists, both on the island and abroad, have

signed up to the SOS Cuba hashtag. The Cuban government's response is simply this. If you care about humanitarian situation in Cuba, the first thing you ought to do is remove the embargo. How are the Cubans responding to the government on that? Do people in the country want a humanitarian corridor like this to happen, even just for short-term relief? The majority of Cubans are aware that the US sanctions on Cuba reduce their living standards. Having said that, I also know a fair amount of Cubans that are in favour of humanitarian aid. But when they're talking about that, they're talking about donations, say from the US government or people around the world to them in order to increase their living standards.

There's not appetite here for sort of humanitarian intervention or military intervention of the sort we saw floated by the mayor of Miami earlier this week, who said that an option like we've seen, for example, with Clinton in Kosovo, he was arguing that an option like that should be, quote, on the table. There's not appetite for a military intervention here. And look, I know you mentioned there were pro-government sort of rallies over the weekend. But with you know, with this level of discontent and this level of economic crisis, where do you think the Cuban government goes from here? What do you expect they'll be trying to do in the coming days and weeks here?

Well, I think the Cuban government is between a rock and a hard place because the proximate cause for these protests is the economic crisis. And they're not in a position to alleviate that. COVID cases are rising, so tourism is not coming back to this island anytime soon. And the Biden administration hasn't softened the embargo at all and is under pressure. But looking at the way things are playing out in the US, both in the media and politically, we'll be under pressure to not soften it anytime soon. And

if that remains the case, the Cuban government will not have the hard currency that it needs to be able to import more food and medicine, let alone more petrol and have money left over to raise people's real living standards that they're going to need in the medium term to be able to alleviate this crisis. So it's very difficult to see where the Cuban government goes from here. Huh. Okay. Wow. Okay, Ed, thank you so much for this. Thank you. All right, that is all for today. Thank you so much for listening to FrontBurner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow. Thank you.