Videos: Anti-Gov’t Protests at Cuba’s DC Embassy Heavily Outnumbered by US Supporters of Havana
23:34 GMT 15.11.2021 (Updated: 13:26 GMT 06.08.2022)
© Morgan Artyukhina
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Only a small crowd appeared to protest against the Cuban government outside its Washington, DC, embassy on Monday in sharp contrast to the summer’s large demonstrations. Supporters of the Cuban government far outnumbered them.
After demonstrations in Cuba in July over electrical brownouts related to the country’s worst COVID-19 outbreak yet, the US moved to increase pressure on the Cuban government, hailing the protests as “pro-democracy” demonstrations and claiming that repression had silenced them. New sanctions followed and the Biden administration vowed to step up its efforts to support Cuban dissidents inside of Cuba, who planned a new national day of action on November 15.
However, a repeat of the July protests has failed to materialize in either Cuba or the United States. Outside the Cuban Embassy in Washington, DC, just five demonstrators appeared, heavily outnumbered by supporters of the Cuban government across the street.
One demonstrator, who gave his name as Mario but said that wasn’t his real name, told Sputnik the protest was “part 2” of demonstrations that happened on July 11.
Part 2: Mario says the blockade doesn't cause many problems in Cuba but that the US actually gives Cuba food. However, he says this is a bad thing the US should stop doing. pic.twitter.com/AUfZ5neYBO
— Morgan Artyukhina (@LavenderNRed) November 15, 2021
Mario told Sputnik he thought that new sanctions were a good idea.
“They have to tighten at the neck” to force the Cuban government to negotiate with the demonstrators, he said, adding that he believes the US needs to step up its enforcement of sanctions on Cuba.
“If they were blocked, as they say, they would never get [food] over there. But they are … it’s a lot of crap,” he told Sputnik. “If the blockade would be enforced, they would not have it.”
US Funding Buttresses Dissidents
The US’ efforts to cultivate and elevate internal Cuban dissent, as MintPress News has demonstrated, included the National Endowment for Democracy’s financial backing of Cuban dissident figures like Yotuel, a hip hop artist whose song “Patria y Vida” became a protest anthem for the Cuban-Americans whose rallies in Miami and Washington, DC, far exceeded those in Cuba itself in both side and anti-socialist sentiment.
Another, playwright Yunior García, founder of the protest group Archipelago, was accused by Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez of being funded by the US for years and trained in counterrevolutionary actions. Garcia has denied the accusations.
The Cuban government has banned the protests, but Garcia said he would still demonstrate on Sunday by marching silently and carrying a white rose.
Speaking last month, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said the coming November 15 protests were “a plan orchestrated by the exterior” just like the July 11 protests, which he said were “nothing more than provocations and acts of vandalism as part of the strategy of the nonconventional war and the ‘soft coup’ against our revolution.”
Indeed, US officials have spoken about the November 15 protests for nearly two months, threatening further action against Havana depending on how the day goes.
However, observers in Cuba noted that while Archipelago didn’t hold its promised demonstration, community members in some places let dissident leaders know they disapproved of the idea, as happened in Villa Clara, where they protested outside of her house.
Community members in Villa Clara are protesting outside the house of one of the provincial leaders of the “Archipelago” movement (counterrevolutionaries).
— Carnation Movement (@carnationmvmt) November 15, 2021
It seems November 15 will end as a day of total rejection of US intervention policy.
pic.twitter.com/fdvDDH5jmm
Day of Rage or ‘Day of Celebration’?
November 15 is also a major day of reopening in Cuba, following the completion of its COVID-19 vaccination campaign. The Cuban medical system has developed five vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and has successfully immunized almost its entire population, including all school-age children, allowing both schools and tourism to reopen on Monday.
Leonardo Flores, an activist with peace group Code Pink, told Sputnik Monday was a “day of celebration,” noting that the reopening of tourism would hopefully “take the bite out of the economic crisis that’s been caused by Covid, but also by the Trump administration’s 243 sanctions, and of course by the 60-year-long criminal blockade.”
I asked him about Cuba buying food from the US: he said @codepink & @PeoplesForumNYC donated 9 tons of food to Cuba b/c of shortages. Yes they buy US chicken, but it's an expensive luxury item & prices there would be lower if the sanctions were gone & they could buy more. pic.twitter.com/Lv4R3ANF6t
— Morgan Artyukhina (@LavenderNRed) November 15, 2021
“It’s crazy to say the blockade hasn’t had an effect when it’s been documented at the United Nations that the blockade has cost Cuba tens of billions of dollars,” Flores said. He noted that Code Pink, Puentes de Amor, and the People’s Forum had recently donated 9 tons of food to Cuba because inflation has driven up costs and created shortages.
Another of the protesters on the Cuban government’s side, Ben Zinevich of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, told Sputnik that the Americans have “nothing to gain” by siding with their own government against Cuba’s, as the Cuban-American migrant community in southern Florida does.
.@Habash_Zebulon of @pslweb @PSLdc said "ppl of the US have nothing to gain" by siding with the US, CIA & NED to cause chaos in Cuba.
— Morgan Artyukhina (@LavenderNRed) November 15, 2021
"We have more in common with working ppl in Havana than we do with" the loud Miami Cubans who fled socialism b/c of their complicity w/Batista. pic.twitter.com/esEk6fcKtT
“We have more in common with working people of Havana than we do with any sort of wealthy ‘refugees,’ so to speak, of the Cuban revolution, people who had to flee because of their connection to the murderous Batista regime,” he said.
Zinevich noted the Miami community’s ties to terrorists who have attacked Cuba, such as Luis Posada Carriles, a CIA agent who in 1976 bombed Cubana Air Flight 455, killing 73 people, and Felix Rodriguez, a CIA agent who helped plan the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and later led the team that hunted down and executed famed Argentine-Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevera in Bolivia in 1967.
Indeed, on April 30, 2020, a Texas man named Alexander Alazo was arrested after firing nearly 30 rounds of an assault rifle at the Cuban embassy in DC, causing damage to the building's exterior but no injuries, as the shoot-up happened early in the morning.
