Timing is everything. Cubans are hungry, tired of power outages, and, after 64 years of socialism, fed up with tyranny. So they are taking to the island’s streets in droves, demanding food, electricity, and liberty. The trouble is, the Biden administration is in office, and, having botched every foreign policy challenge before it, the likelihood it will get Cuba right is very slim.
That’s not to say that Cubans should just sit idly by, buying more candles in the black market to light up their dilapidated dwellings, or putting up with communism for one more single second, as they wait for a regime change to come to Washington first.
No. You strike while the iron is hot, and if Cubans are so desperate that they’ve lost the fear of a police state that doesn’t shrink from using terrorism, then now is the time to make their voices heard.
And that is what they’ve been doing lately, taking to the streets in the thousands Sunday from the eastern city of Bayamo, where they chanted “Libertad!”, to Santiago de Cuba, also in the east of the island, where they marched in front of a police station, to Artemisa west of Havana.
The island has been mired in a spiraling economic crisis for months, as the communist government seems to no longer be able to provide even basic necessities.
But the Biden record on supporting Cubans’ desire for freedom does not inspire confidence, especially when it comes to protests. Cubans, for example, courageously took to the streets en masse on July 11, 2021, with President Joe Biden barely six months into his term. They were the largest protests since the triumph of the revolution on New Year’s Eve 1958 and filled many with hopes that the end of the dictatorship was near.
The government quashed such hopes immediately, unleashing a wave of repression that saw the arrests of more than 1,500. “The authorities arbitrarily detained hundreds of people without informing their families of their whereabouts, kept activists and independent journalists under extreme surveillance, and cut off the population’s internet access,” according to Amnesty International. More than 600 Cubans still languish behind bars three years later.
While the arrests, which included minors, were meant to sow terror in the population, something the Cuban Communist Party has perfected in over six decades, cutting off the internet was done to ensure that Cubans were isolated from one another.
Biden failed to act decisively, spurning a chorus of pleas to provide Cubans with internet access. Many of those calls came from Florida members of Congress, including Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL), who said at a congressional hearing 11 days after the 2021 protest, “The Biden administration could enhance the WiFi from the Havana embassy or from Guantanamo, and this can be done in minutes.” Guantanamo Bay in eastern Cuba hosts a U.S. Navy base.
Another suggested strategy was to float an internet balloon near the island. Biden, again, demurred.
The Cuban government has pledged to stay away from truculent means this time, but there are reports that, in fact, it is behaving exactly as it behaved three years ago.
“The cowardly regime shut down internet access and mobilized its secret police to brutalize and jail the protesters,” Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-FL), the only member of Congress born on the island, said of this month’s protests. “After 64 years of tyranny and repression, the Cuban people want to be free.”
Gimenez added, “I call on the Biden administration to do the right thing and immediately provide the island of Cuba with satellite internet.”
Again, crickets from the White House.
But an even worse outcome than doing nothing would be for the Biden team to try to bail out the Cuban regime. The U.S. Agency for International Development provides Cuba with what it calls “humanitarian assistance,” most of which, we can be sure, benefits the regime’s pockets.
The urge to bail out the Cuban regime would stem from the wish to “avoid chaos in Cuba,” or to “ease a technocratic transition,” or some other cliched response that would frustrate Cubans’ yearning for freedom once again.
Biden’s team at the State Department Cuba desk has developed close connections with Cuba’s apparatchiks. Just a few months ago, the administration eased restrictions put on the island because it is on the U.S. government’s state sponsor of terrorism list, never mind an enemy of the U.S., to allow more financial support to flow to the island.
So far, it looks like an election-year Biden has not yet decided to ride to the rescue of the communists. The Hill reports that Cuban officials, sensing their end might now be finally near, are desperately “pushing every button at their disposal to get the Biden administration’s attention,” offering concessions on matters they wouldn’t have dared to discuss before, including human rights violations.
But, a top Cuban official told the Hill, “There is no answer. There is no answer.”
Let’s hope that this non-responsiveness lasts. It’s not that Cuba’s offer to discuss its gross human rights violations is too little, too late. It’s that Havana doesn’t mean it.
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“The Cuban regime has no interest in talking genuinely about human rights,” Salazar told the Hill this week. “Only the regime has it in its own power to restore human rights to the Cuban people — the United States cannot give rights to anyone in Cuba. I hope this crisis and the protests in Santiago de Cuba expose the failures of communism and lead to an end of the dictatorship.”
If Biden won’t do anything to give Cubans enhanced internet access, he should at least refrain from throwing the regime and its henchmen a lifeline.
Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the author of BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution.
