WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – Only in Cuba does Gennady Rodriguez, a lawyer who once worked for the island’s Catholic Church, have compatibility with the profile of an enemy of the state.
Rodriguez is one of countless influential expats on social media, along with independent media and journalists who are citizens of the island, whom the communist regime in Havana blames for sparking Cuban protests.
Its online page and YouTube channel 23 and Flagler, named after the main streets of Havana and Miami, retrieve videos and reports from Cuba, upload comments and push them to go viral.
“When you show something of what happened in Cuba, in a video, we review it to make it visible,” said Rodriguez, 40, who arrived in the United States in 2013.
Freedom protests are not easy, and government criticism leading to food shortages, power outages and an alarming rise in coronavirus infections and deaths first erupted in dozens of Cuban villages on July 11. the eyes and ears of the world on Cuba, sharing and disseminating photographs of the street marches and the repression that followed.
What we know about the demonstrations in Cuba: of protesters, dozens of arrests, 1 death
The intense protests are unprecedented, but this is the first time that widespread unrest has spread on the Web around the world, bypassing the veil of Cuba’s state media, and spurred demonstrations of solidarity beyond South Florida, in Washington, DC, New York. , Madrid and Los Angeles.
“These other people from all over the world are protesting, freedom is not easy in Cuba because they have heard and noticed their brothers and sisters in the streets of Cuba asking for freedom,” Rodriguez added. “What happened in Cuba is historic. I think so. inflection point. “
An imaginable turning point in component through the progression of independent media within the totalitarian state over the more than 30 years. This effort has attracted the help of global civil society and expat friends and families of Cubans who have provided camera phones and paid for the use of foreign knowledge, allowing a multitude of citizen hounds to take to the streets and bring the global with them through their smartphones.
“The irony, of course, is that the web access used to viralize the protests came here from the Cuban government,” said Theodore Henken, co-editor of Cuban Digital Revolution: Citizen Innovation and State Policy. Radio and TV] Martis, or the U. S. government. It is the Cuban government that provided the channel. “
This is an incongruous and parallel reality. Cuba, an island of 11 million people suffering from severe shortages of food, medicine and basic needs, also has 7. 1 million web users, 55% of whom are social media platforms and 3. 4 million who connect to the Internet from their smartphones.
Henken’s co-editor on Cuba’s virtual revolution, Sara García Santamaría, warns that those official 2020 government statistics are not as impressive as they seem. connections are poor and service uneven.
However, García Santamaría can attest that Cuba’s online access “is superior to what we think”, because people, seeing her as a foreigner, approached her on the street to ask for help in creating Facebook accounts.
He said Cuban officials had presented the website in the 1990s to artists, doctors, hounds and teachers, believing it would adapt to the government’s propaganda efforts.
“The deal was that they had to use the web to open a blog and the government,” said García Santamaría, who teaches mass communication at a university in Barcelona, Spain.
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But they stick to the government line, they reported on the truth around them. Journalists, bloggers and others interviewed by Garcia Santamaria said they originally did not seek to be dissenting voices, on the contrary, he said, they have done what hounds do. , reportage and dissemination.
Over time, the truth they showed that the world moved further and further away from the official “truth” — the narrative the government sought to have said — to a much more critical and scrutinizing representation of the truth on the island.
“The government has given them a tool to tell the fact about Cuba,” he said. “And they did. “
And the result, Henken added, is that in Cuba it has been “exposed. “
“Anyone who doubted that other people didn’t need to be replaced in Cuba turned out to be misinformed, that’s very transparent in the world,” he said. “The concept that the United States is the problem, or that Cubans really like their system, turned out to be a false concept. “
Henken said many Cuban newscasters have trained at the University of Havana and other higher education establishments, and then accepted jobs in state media, such as Granma and Trabajadores, before they “can’t take it anymore and manage for themselves. “.
Henken, a professor of sociology and Latin American studies at Baruch College, has compiled a list of CubaNet, ADN Cuba, Cyber Cuba, Diario de Cuba, El Estornudo, El Toque, Periodismo del Barrio and 14 y Medio, to illustrate the proliferation of media.
He said that the independent journalism sites in Cuba in the last five years serve as “transnationals,” that is, with a foreign role.
“With WhatsApp and all other technologies, they can collaborate in real time with the newscasts on the floor in Cuba and manage the sites from the outside,” Henken said.
Then there are the citizen newscasts who have accessed social media platforms, again, first for percentages of images and attach with their families, to post videos of street protests, which they were able to do, in many cases, with smartphones that were given to them through relatives who visited the island, or paid with the salary of their self-employment. , as well as regulations that allowed friends and members of the circle of family to pay for the use of the data.
“They have YouTube channels and they do live reporting, as they’ve noticed other people do in other places,” Garcia Santamaria said. “Cubans are not as remote as you think. “
The increase in cell phone use has coincided with a wave of apolitical protests in recent years, with the government allowing marches and demonstrations similar to animal rights campaigns, calls to lower prices and other causes, Santamaria added.
“These protests came with social media campaigns,” he said. “They opened a window where other people learned that they can just protest, protest, that it was an option. That’s another vital element. “
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The U. S. government has been less involved in this effort.
While the United States Agency for International Development and the National Foundation for Democracy have funded virtual media aimed at Cuba, Washington has long invested the maximum of its media budget in Radio and TV Marti broadcasts, focusing on twentieth-century technology, even as a Cuban. citizens embraced the platforms of the twenty-first century.
This is the lesson for American politicians and “Free Cuba” protesters.
The rise and role of independent journalists who have put Cuba’s protests on the front pages of the world is a testament to commitment, observers for Cuba say, not isolation, and an example of how biological and local movements and organizations respond to the nuances of Cuban society. and life situations can be helped.
The lax business economy is an example in which the style presented through the Cuban independent press and social media influencers can be replicated, and one of the main supporters is a former political hawk from Cuba.
Under President George W. Bush, Republican Carlos Gutierrez, former ceo of Kellogg Company, led the U. S. Department of Commerce and was a strong advocate for a tighter circle of family money flows from the United States and restrictions.
Think now.
“I was an intransigent,” Gutierrez said. I’m saying we want to think strategically. Because take a step back and say, “Has the strategy of the last 62 years had an impact?”Cuba has replaced much more than we think. and a big component of that replacement is that you see a lot of iPhones on the streets. “
Gutierrez credits President Obama’s reopening policies, which he said have allowed Cuba’s virtual economy to take a “big leap forward” as U. S. companies, adding Google, players and smartphones, proliferated on the island.
“It’s very elegant to say that those two years of Obama’s opening have done nothing,” he said. “Compare those two years to the last 62. Businesses were opening up. Cubans were hopeful. They were excited. They had their own restaurants, they had a taxi company, they had a plumbing company. There was economic power. “
That’s the lesson, Gutierrez said.
“I don’t think we’re going to overthrow the regime. It’s a conscience I took when I was in government,” he said. “Politics in Cuba will be made in Cuba. What we can do strategically is to help the Cuban people. “. “
And as with the “explosion of virtual media,” he said, the same can be completed by selling and strengthening loose to “reduce dependence” on government and drive change.
That’s why Gutierrez said he supports lifting limits on remittances, the dollars the U. S. sends to those who enjoy the island, and that the U. S. government deserves regulations on the sale of food and medicine to the island.
U. S. corporations are already the largest exporter of goods to Cuba, including the embargo, but Gutierrez said U. S. policy requiring the sale of money and prohibiting 30-day credit extensions “makes it very difficult” for Cuban corporations.
“The simple thing is to say that the Cuban regime will do it,” he said, “the Cuban people will do it. “
A Miami Democrat, former Congressman Joe Garcia, still says immediate and urgent assistance to the island is needed given the dual political and humanitarian crisis.
It’s also not easy for the Cuban government to release all those it has arrested for protesting and supports calls for Biden’s management to send syringes to Cuba to decrease the number of coronavirus deaths.
“COVID is killing capitalists and communists,” he said.
Garcia also believes Cuban Americans are part of an economic program, but this will require attitude adjustments on both sides of the Florida Strait.
“When asked, [the Cuban government] said it would treat Cuban Americans like any other foreigner,” he said. “No, they can’t treat me like any other stranger. I am a component of the nation. I have an advantage. “
The Havana official wants to replace his mentality, and Garcia says he told the Cuban business government that this was a series of visits to the island.
These adjustments should include, he said, offering personal economic rights and promises to companies. The Cuban government should also allow small and medium-sized businesses and the Havana Chamber of Commerce to sign Cuban-American-owned businesses in Cuba. .
Cuban exiles and immigrants will also have to have their own epiphany and another ending in Cuba.
“Where does this take you? It’s a damning question: what does victory look like for Cuban Americans?”said Garcia, former executive director of the anti-Castro group, the Cuban-American National Foundation.
One Sunday afternoon in western Miami-Dade County, an assisted apartment worker confessed with dismay: she had signed an online petition calling for a U. S. invasion of Cuba. advocating for violence that can put his own circle of family members at risk, but said he did so in a time of anger and despair.
A man who was visiting his elderly mom said he understood her change in mindset, but insisted that the explanation for why the protests were settling in Cuba was the result of cutting off remittances and to Cuba through Americans and expats. when this money does not pass to Cuba, he said, the messes of a communist formula imposed on them by a dictatorship have become transparent to Cubans.
From Miami to Tampa to West Palm Beach, the invasions and the end of subsidies are sentiments widely expressed in demonstrations of solidarity for a loose Cuba, explained as the elimination of all vestiges of the Castro brothers’ dictatorship.
The punitive and punitive policies of bloodless war are especially hot in the face of beatings and arrests of protesters through the regime in La Habana. La last week, human rights teams reported that more than 700 people have been arrested, detained or sentenced to punishment. .
Standing in the lobby of the 2506th Brigade museum and library in hialeah gardens, adorned with images of those who died in the last U. S. -backed invasion of Cuba, Bay of Pigs veteran Jorge Gutierrez Isaguirre called to action.
“I don’t have confidence in [Biden’s] administration,” said Gutierrez Isaguirre, one of the founders of the influential and respected Brigade 2506 Group, which listened to former President Donald Trump during his years in the White House.
For Cuba’s hardliners, Biden represents Obama, and Obama recalls photographs of a U. S. president mocking Raul Castro at a baseball game.
In contrast, Trump was the only U. S. presidential candidate to approve the brigade, and they were rewarded with influence over Cuban politics when the Trump administration canceled the economic opening to the island of the previous Obama administration.
Gutierrez Isaguirre said the protests in Cuba result in rapprochement policies, such as cruise ships loaded with party tourists sailing at the island’s ports of call, with the Cuban government now led by Miguel Diaz-Canel, a mistake.
Gutierrez Isaguirre said he would like to see a U. S. surgical strike, such as interventions in Panama to overthrow strongman Manuel Noriega or in Granada to overthrow a communist leader. He doubts that this will happen, but believes that foreign tension can still create situations. for a “overthrow of the regime”.
You’re safe, he says.
“The demonstrations have beproved the vision of those who sought to put their heads on the ground like an ostrich with a policy almost of support for the Cuban regime,” he said.
Those who have followed Cuba’s social media and protest disagree.
“A lot of what they do in Miami is based on wishful thinking and not on a serious assessment of the effect they may have. All of this is a service of unrealistic expectations. Support the other people on the island. They are cut off from those currents.
Henken said the most recent immigrants from Cuba, such as Rodriguez de Flagler, 23, may not be the ones leading U. S. policy, but they demonstrate a “much more nuanced understanding of Cuba and the connection to Cuba. “
For his part, Rodriguez warns that he opposes excessive alignment with Washington and opposes the intervention of the army.
“Cubans will have to realize that they will have to communicate with each other and be guilty of everything that happens,” he said.
And most importantly, he said, keep informing and sharing.
This, for some, is at the heart of today’s protests.
Thirty years ago, the dean of the School of Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill brought the first of a dozen teams of students to Cuba in what is arguably one of the first Cuban-American exchange systems aimed at journalism.
Over the next quarter-century, Richard Cole, with the help of grants from the MacArthur Foundation and others, would also bring Cuban journalism professors to the United States and the deans of other American universities interacted in the progression of media on the island.
Cole says its purpose is quite simple.
“All I was looking for was for American academics to think more about freedom and democracy,” Cole said. “And that Cuban academics saw how a relaxed press worked here. “
Follow Antonio Fins on Twitter: @PBPoliticsFins.