According to official sources and social media, many citizens participated in a rare public demonstration in Santiago, the second-largest city in Cuba. This prompted President Miguel Diaz-Canel to urge for discussion in an “atmosphere of tranquility and peace.”
According to footage shared on social media, protesters in Santiago went to the streets as the people yelled “power and food” as outages in certain areas that lasted for up to 18 hours a day, affecting frozen food supplies and escalating tensions on the island.
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Cuba has fallen into a near-unprecedented economic crisis since the COVID-19 pandemic, with vast shortages of food, fuel, and medicine stoking a record-breaking exodus that has seen upwards of 400,000 people migrate to the United States.
According to a social media account maintained by the state-run CubaDebate, police had come to Santiago intending to control the situation while “preventing violence.”
It was unclear at first if anyone had been taken into custody during the demonstration.
Officials from the Santiago Communist Party, Beatriz Johnson, stated that demonstrators in the eastern Cuban city were paying attention by listening “attentively” to the government’s justifications for food and electricity shortages had been “respectful.”
Social media videos appear to show that the march was nonviolent. Late into Sunday night, Havana, the capital of Cuba, and the surrounding areas that Reuters examined seemed peaceful. The authenticity of videos posted on social media purporting to show protests in other Cuban cities could not be immediately verified by Reuters.
There have been protests in Santiago and other places, according to the US embassy in Havana.
“We urge the Cuban government to respect the human rights of the protesters and address the legitimate needs of the Cuban people,” the embassy stated on X the social media platform formally known as Twitter.
The long-standing U.S. trade embargo and sanctions, according to Cuba’s foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez, are to blame for the country’s “acute economic situation,” and he chastised the U.S. Embassy’s remarks.
Rodriguez tweeted, “The US Government, especially its embassy in #Cuba, must refrain from interfering in the country’s internal affairs and inciting social disorder.”
Though incredibly uncommon, protests have become increasingly frequent on the island in recent years as the nation has been rocked by an economic crisis.
The freedom to protest is guaranteed to the people of Cuba under the 2019 constitution, but a bill clarifying this right is stuck in the legislature, leaving those who go to the streets in legal confusion.
Rights organizations, the European Union, and the US have criticized Cuba for its harsh and brutal handling of the greatest anti-government demonstrations since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, which took place on July 11, 2021, more than two years earlier.
According to the Cuban authorities, the inmates had committed assault, vandalism, and sedition.
