By Angry GenXer
HAVANA TIMES – A month has now passed since Trump proclaimed new restrictive measures against the Cuban economy. Misery in Cuba deepens; the rich and powerful remain rich and powerful, while events seem to be accelerating. Official US spokespeople talk about intergovernmental conversations at the highest level. The phrase “friendly takeover” of Cuba by the United States appears—whatever that might mean—while here, hopelessness is becoming routine.
In Cuba, there are many dissenting voices criticizing the country’s collapse. They search for its causes and those responsible. Many of these people, from very diverse ideologies—ranging from nationalist Christian conservatives to neo-Marxists and anarchists—project their opinions on social media, individually or in groups. Not all of them identify as “dissidents” or “opponents of the government,” but the vast majority are true political activists, with no subordination to official entities.
Uniting Affections
During the Covid pandemic, the protests of November 27, 2020, and especially those of July 11, 2021, saw a large part of Cuba’s dissent—diverse in ideology—manage to unite in shared affections, friendships, and civic activism.
What prevailed was the critical and the human. Probably the moment of greatest cohesion in Cuban activism came during its support for last year’s student strike, sparked by changes in mobile phone service pricing adopted by the state monopoly ETECSA—a measure that affected the vast majority of the population. Perhaps that is why, for once, dissenting activism on social media seemed to share several points of consensus.
Throughout the previous period, official police and ideological authorities did everything possible to atomize protest and divide the collective movements that had formed. Many people went into exile; yet activist support for the university strike confirmed that solidarities within a broad pluralism of opinions remained alive. Mutual bonds filled the political vacuum into which officialdom tried to push them. There are very few “organizations” today; what mostly exist are “alternative” social media outlets of different tendencies, in some cases composed of a single influencer.
Their posts are often filled with heated accusations. They demand justice; they claim the right to name, in no uncertain terms, the villains behind the ongoing disaster in which Cuba barely survives. A prolonged humanitarian crisis shaped by the systematic incompetence of the island’s establishment and its desire to continue exercising monopolistic power and privilege: its corporate interests determine government decisions, not even one of which has succeeded in recent years—at least from the perspective “from below.”
Trump Arrives
And then came January 3 and later January 29. Trump and Rubio intervened in Venezuela and drastically restricted fuel imports to Cuba. These actions by the US government radically worsened the Cuban crisis, adding more pain and despair: today our bodies and souls suffer them even when we try to sleep.
Cuban alternative media and influencers then became polarized. Each pole identified its own villain. The menu basically offers two options: the Cuban government, “the communists,” and the military megacorporation GAESA; or Trump, MAGA, Marco Rubio, and “the gringos.”
Critical activism was automatically weakened; not even the massacre in Gaza had produced such a deep cleavage on Cuban social media.
Fights on Social Media
Over the past month, fights online have revolved around those two poles, using anything as a pretext:
¡Díaz-Canel speaks for two hours without saying anything about how they plan to fix the Cuban crisis! VS. What a defense of “the wretched of the earth”!
¡Cuban political police arrest Holguín influencers from the El 4tico project! VS. Of course— they were wearing caps inspired by MAGA!
¡Bad Bunny sings at the Super Bowl! VS. His denunciation of Yankee imperialism isn’t clear at all!
At this very moment, the polarizing issue seems to be the mysterious shootout between a boat loaded with weapons—allegedly stolen in the US—and another belonging to the Cuban border guards. It is not yet known how many dead or wounded there were, but opinions are already formed.
Some call this “cognitive warfare”: like rapid maneuvers on a theater of operations, some topics are immediately replaced by others; dishes on the menu are brought out and taken away; everything flows, but the opposition remains. Meanwhile, Trump says he is already arranging with the establishment here the “friendly takeover of Cuba.”
Who benefits?
The Cuban authorities currently in power. And Trump. His international leadership has never been particularly marked by “human rights” issues and the like. It is all about “our oil,” “our markets,” and pushing Russia and China out of “our” area of influence.
And in the long run, it has been Trump’s latest measures that have been dividing Cuban activism.
We already saw in Syria and Venezuela how Trump blithely ignored organized opposition figures in those countries—who had confronted governments he himself considered hostile and helped overthrow.
In Gaza, Iran, and Rojava, Syria, his diplomacy used massacres to exert geopolitical and economic pressure.
Trump seeks to empower not those who seek freedom, but those who know how to obey him and fulfill the interests and privileges of those who put him in power.
We are living through a unique opportunity to learn how the powerful construct functional mechanisms among themselves. Understanding this is exceptionally important if Cuba is to escape such machinery and finally emerge from the abyss. Hopefully our activists will manage to see it before it is too late. In doing so, mutual bonds—now at risk—may also reemerge.
Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.