From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Cubans More Excited About School Reopening Than Regime Change
Date November 17, 2021 1:00 AM
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[Even if they blame their government for mismanagement,
corruption, and a system that stifles private enterprise, few fail to
recognize the enormous impact of U.S. sanctions. ]
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CUBANS MORE EXCITED ABOUT SCHOOL REOPENING THAN REGIME CHANGE  
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Medea Benjamin
November 16, 2021
Common Dreams
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_ Even if they blame their government for mismanagement, corruption,
and a system that stifles private enterprise, few fail to recognize
the enormous impact of U.S. sanctions. _

People take part in a demonstration to support the government of the
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel in Havana, on July 11, 2021., Yamil
Lage/AFP via Getty Images

 

"IF YOU BUILD IT, they will come," said Kevin Costner in the Field of
Dreams. In Cuba, they didn't come. Dissidents on the island, with
their U.S. backers, had been working feverishly for months to turn the
unprecedented July 11 protests into a crescendo of government
opposition on November 15. They built a formidable structure, with
sophisticated social media (including an abundance of fake news),
piles of cash from Cuban Americans and the U.S. government, and
declarations of support from a bipartisan Congress and all the way up
to the White House.

Even after the Cuban government denied the protesters a permit on the
grounds that they were part of a destabilization campaign led by the
United States, anti-government forces insisted that they were
undeterred and were ready to take the risks. But in the end, their
Field of Dreams turned out to be an illusion. What happened?

Intimidation of dissidents was certainly a key factor. The leader of
the Facebook group Archipelago, Yunior Garcia, was kept under virtual
house arrest. Other leaders were threatened with arrest and repudiated
by their pro-revolution neighbors.

But at the grassroots, I talked to Cubans who had second thoughts
about the usefulness of street protests. They had come into the
streets on July 11, spontaneously, with all kinds of legitimate
gripes: the scarcity of food and medicines, the long lines for basic
goods, the rapid spread of COVID, the hard currency stores they didn't
have access to. But in the intervening months between the July
protests and November, many realized that street protests only created
division when the country needed unity. They realized that despite all
the social media hype, the government was not about the fall, and that
even if it did, there was no telling what would follow. If it was
chaos and civil strife, or a rush of voracious Cuban Americans trying
to grab waterfront island properties, their precarious economic
situation might be even worse.

"I was out protesting on July 11," a young mother in Old Havana told
me. "But since then, I've been weighing the pros and cons. The food
situation here is terrible—we have to stand in lines for everything.
On the other hand, we are safe. People don't have guns and go around
killing each other; the police don't shoot people; we don't have to
worry about our children when they are outside playing and they get a
good education for free. If this government really collapsed, I'm
afraid we might lose more than we gain."

People were also turned off by the choice of the day, November 15,
which was timed to wreak havoc on precisely the day of Cuba's planned
reopening after nearly two years of strict pandemic restrictions.
Cubans who make their living from tourism, the island's major industry
that had been decimated by the COVID showdown, have been anxiously
awaiting the November 15 resurgence of foreign visitors. The last
thing they wanted was to scare off tourists with internal conflict.

And November 15 was also the first day all schools would be open.
Children in their neatly pressed uniforms were bursting with
excitement after being cooped up for so long. Parents were thrilled
that life was slowly getting back to normal now that almost the entire
population—starting at age 2—had been vaccinated with their
locally produced vaccine. Whomever picked this momentous day for
nationwide protests made an epic mistake.

Moving forward, most Cubans seem more concerned with getting their
economy fired up than toppling their leaders. Even if they blame their
government for mismanagement, corruption and a system that stifles
private enterprise, few fail to recognize the enormous impact of U.S.
sanctions. While the island has been under some form of sanctions for
the past 60 years, the Trump administration added over 200 new
measures that dealt serious blows, such as stopping the flow of
remittances from Cuban Americans to their families back home and
prohibiting U.S. cruise ships from making stops in the island (a
business that had flourished under President Obama's openings).
Trump's catering to right-wing Cuban Americans was successful in terms
of winning Florida and giving the Republicans two more South Florida
congressional seats, but it made life miserable for the Cuban people.
Unfortunately, President Biden has continued Trump's
hardline—putting partisan politics above the well-being of 11
million people.

There is little Cuba can do to alter U.S. policy, but they can—and
want to—make their own internal changes. A theme I heard over and
over from young revolutionaries is that the best way to challenge the
counterrevolution is to make the revolution better. At an in-person
gathering of leftist Cubans who, during the pandemic, created a
popular Telegram chat group called La Manigua, I asked what kind of
changes people would like to see. One by one, they gave examples:
challenge the stifling bureaucracy, fire inept or corrupt people from
their positions, encourage more grassroots initiatives, pass the
Family Code that would give full rights to women and the gay
community; get serious about confronting racism.

The last person wanted to talk about what he DOESN'T want to change.
That included the nation's emphasis on healthcare, science and
education that allowed Cubans to come up with their own vaccine and
vaccinate the entire population; the sense of community that Cubans
displayed as they helped each other through this pandemic; and the
values of international solidarity embodied in the Cuban healthcare
brigades that have, for decades, been going around the world saving
lives.

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The weekend before the planned protest, a new group of revolutionary
youth called Pañuelos Rojos, or Red Scarves, set up a 48-hour
encampment with music, theater, games and group discussions. On the
last day of the encampment, there was a concert. The young people were
sitting on the floor, grooving to the music of the musician Tony
Avila, when the Cuban president, Miguel Diaz-Canal, showed up. The
students cheered as he sat down on the cement floor with them. Avila
was in the middle of a song called Mi Casa (My House). "I'm going to
change the furniture in my house," he sang. "I'll change the color of
the walls, redo the doors, the windows, and take down some of the
walls." Everyone was singing with him, and the president's head was
nodding up and down. The crowd roared when it came to this verse:
"Although I'm happy in my house, there are changes that must be made.
But I won't go too fast, because I don't want to damage the
foundation."

Certainly, the efforts by the dissidents and their U.S. backers to
damage the foundation and topple the Cuban government are not over.
But as the head of the North American division in the Foreign
Ministry, Carlos Fernando de Cossio, tweeted, "The US government
misread Cuba when it decided to invest so heavily in trying to
instigate insurrection. We Cubans want to improve our country & move
forward, not back to the times when we were the friendly playground of
US capital, corruption & ambition." If only the U.S. government would
learn this 60-year-old lesson.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel
free to republish and share widely.

[Medea Benjamin] [[link removed]]

Medea Benjamin [[link removed]]

MEDEA BENJAMIN [[link removed]],
co-founder of Global Exchange [[link removed]] and
CODEPINK: Women for Peace [[link removed]], is the
author of the 2018 book, "_Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics
of the Islamic Republic of Iran
[[link removed]]." _Her
previous books include: "_Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi
Connection
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(2016); "_Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control
[[link removed]]_" (2013); "_Don’t Be
Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart
[[link removed]]_" (1989), and (with Jodie
Evans) "_Stop the Next War Now (Inner Ocean Action Guide)
[[link removed]]_"
(2005). 

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