In dozens of big Cuban cities, ordinary people of all backgrounds did something historic over the weekend. They rose up and began mass protests against their nation’s tyrannical regime.
They want freedom, and they are trying to win it. Citizens have been seen on camera, courageously gathering in front of the Communist Party’s headquarters, chanting, “Cuba isn’t yours!” and “Libertad!” They have brought out statues of the Virgin Mary, and some have even been caught on camera waving American flags.
This is a difficult and risky thing for Cubans to do. For these protests, unlike the ones in which Americans routinely participate, do not take place in a country that tolerates dissent. Cuban protesters face being snitched on for their involvement or being recognized in videos. They risk arrest, loss of employment, harassment, and other serious reprisals just for voicing displeasure with the regime. Cuba’s security services are famous for violently putting down dissent.
But the people of Cuba are, nevertheless and above all, doing the right thing. The authorities cannot arrest or slaughter everyone. It is long past time for the communist dictators to be overthrown. It is time, as it was in East Germany decades ago, for the socialists to be discarded and their collaborators and domestic spies exposed.
Unfortunately and shamefully, President Joe Biden’s administration stumbled when the time came to help our island neighbors obtain their freedom.
Administration officials began by trying to confuse the public. Acting Assistant Secretary of State Julie Chung, for example, claimed the demonstrations were about COVID. “Peaceful protests are growing in #Cuba as the Cuban people exercise their right to peaceful assembly to express concern about rising COVID cases/deaths & medicine shortages,” Chung wrote on Twitter. “We commend the numerous efforts of the Cuban people mobilizing donations to help neighbors in need.” She also went out of her way to criticize “calls to combat” by protesters and to “condemn any violence.”
It is amusing to imagine Cubans rising up to protest the failings of their nation’s healthcare system, which is unjustifiably praised by leftists the world over. We are unaware of even anecdotal evidence of protesters complaining specifically about COVID. On the other hand, evidence abounds that Cubans are protesting against intolerable political repression by an evil regime that has long outlived others of a similar ilk. They are marching to remove and replace a system that inevitably causes shortages (including shortages of medicine and healthcare supplies) everywhere it is tried.
After Chung’s ridiculous tweet, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan wrote that the administration “would strongly condemn any violence or targeting of peaceful protesters who are exercising their universal rights.” Better than nothing, perhaps, but this is weak stuff. These people need help. Official U.S. policy toward Cuba calls for regime change. What is Biden doing to make that happen now that the Cuban people are so obviously demanding it?
For six decades, Cuba’s regime has been manifestly incompetent at managing national affairs to its citizens benefit, even as it has gone to great lengths to investigate and persecute them for speaking their opinions, practicing their faith, accessing the full, uncensored internet, and just plain living their lives.
The regime blames problems on the U.S. embargo, but Cuba has trade with the rest of the world and now even some degree of trade with the United States, and it has done no good. Why? Because people persistently impoverished by communism cannot participate meaningfully in international trade. Those forbidden by their government from accessing outside ideas cannot benefit fully from other ways of thinking.
The government that Fidel Castro overthrew in 1959 was no paragon of justice. But it was never as cruel or ugly as what replaced it. Castro murdered his enemies; what remained of Cuba’s former wealth after the revolution was cannibalized and desiccated, not built up. Today, ordinary Cubans can see the improvements to the outside world’s standard of living, including in once far-poorer countries such as Mexico, and they know they have been cheated. Their once-prosperous country has regressed into a backwater.
By the time Biden released his own statement, he had something marginally more constructive to say. Although he still falsely insinuated that this is about COVID, he did unambiguously affirm and support Cubans’ quest for freedom, and he identified the true problem in Cuba.
“We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime,” he said in a statement.
Two cheers for this response. Please, keep it up, and add to it.
Before this era of all-out leftism among Democrats, their party’s politicians used to show proud anti-communist colors. Today, it takes more courage for Biden to do the right thing than it did for JFK. He must tell his party’s radicals, people who still romanticize mass murderers such as Castro and Che Guevara, to pound sand. Liberty demands no less.
