Last Sunday, something unusual happened in Cuba.
People went into the streets.
What began in San Antonio de los Baños spread into demonstrations across towns and cities, including Havana. Protesters complained about food shortages, medicine, electricity cuts and the government’s handling of COVID-19. Some shouted “Patria y Vida” — “Homeland and Life” — a deliberate reversal of the revolutionary slogan “Patria o Muerte”.
Others demanded political freedom.
For a country where large anti-government demonstrations are extremely rare, the scale of the protests was remarkable.
So was the government’s response.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel blamed much of the unrest on the United States and called on supporters of the revolution to confront the demonstrations. Security forces moved against protesters, internet access was disrupted, and arrests followed.
The United States responded by blaming Cuba’s communist government.
And almost immediately, the argument divided into two completely different explanations.
One says:
This is what communism does.
The other says:
This is what American sanctions do.
I don’t think either explanation is sufficient.
And the determination to choose between them may actually prevent us from understanding why Cubans are protesting at all.
Cuba is facing a genuine economic crisis
The immediate grievances are not difficult to find.
Cubans have faced shortages of food and medicine.
There have been electricity cuts.
COVID-19 infections have increased sharply, placing further pressure on the health system.
The economy contracted dramatically last year.
Tourism, one of Cuba’s most important sources of foreign currency, was devastated by the pandemic.
All of those pressures eventually arrive in the same place: ordinary households.
It is easy to discuss economic crises through GDP figures, foreign-exchange shortages and government budgets.
For the person experiencing one, the crisis is much simpler.
Can I buy food?
Can I find medicine?
Will the electricity stay on?
Can I earn enough to support my family?
Once a government repeatedly fails those tests, economic dissatisfaction becomes political remarkably quickly.
That appears to be part of what Cuba is experiencing.
But identifying the hardship is easier than identifying who caused it.
The embargo matters
The United States has maintained an economic embargo against Cuba for decades.
The Trump administration tightened pressure further, including additional sanctions and restrictions, and the Biden administration has so far left much of that policy intact.
It would therefore be ridiculous to analyse Cuba’s economic problems as though the world’s largest economy, located about 150 kilometres away, had spent the last sixty years behaving normally towards it.
Sanctions impose costs.
They make transactions more difficult.
They discourage businesses from dealing with Cuba.
They restrict access to financing and complicate the government’s ability to obtain foreign currency.
The pandemic then devastated tourism, making an already difficult situation considerably worse.
So when the Cuban government says American policy contributes to the country’s economic problems, that claim cannot simply be dismissed as propaganda.
The United States is deliberately attempting to place economic pressure on Cuba.
It cannot then pretend that the economic pressure has no economic consequences.
But that is only half the argument.
The embargo cannot explain everything
Cuba’s government has also made economic choices of its own.
It operates a heavily state-controlled economy.
Private enterprise has historically been restricted.
The government controls large sections of production and distribution.
Economic reforms have occurred, but slowly and unevenly.
This matters because blaming sanctions for every shortage creates an impossible argument to test.
If the economy performs badly, sanctions are responsible.
If the economy performs well, the government deserves credit.
A political system cannot claim responsibility only for successes.
The Cuban government has governed the island for more than six decades.
At some point, its own institutions, incentives and policies have to become part of the explanation for economic performance.
That does not make the embargo irrelevant.
It means two things can damage an economy simultaneously.
American sanctions can make Cuba poorer.
Cuban economic policy can make Cuba poorer.
The existence of one does not magically disprove the other.
This is where ideology becomes unhelpful
Cuba is almost impossible to discuss without the conversation becoming ideological.
For supporters of socialism, Cuba can become evidence of what a small country achieved despite American hostility: universal healthcare, education and resistance to US domination.
For critics of socialism, Cuba becomes evidence that state-controlled economies inevitably produce scarcity and repression.
Both sides then select whichever facts support the political system they already prefer.
I find that increasingly unsatisfying.
If the purpose of political analysis is to determine what actually causes outcomes, ideology should be something we investigate, not something that supplies the answer before we begin.
Cuba’s healthcare achievements can be real while its political repression is also real.
American sanctions can be harmful while Cuban economic management is also harmful.
A revolution can originally respond to genuine inequality and foreign domination and later create institutions that suppress dissent.
Political systems do not become entirely good or entirely bad because we have found the correct label for them.
The internet has changed protest
There is another reason these demonstrations are different.
Cubans increasingly have access to mobile internet.
That changes the relationship between citizens and the state.
A protest in one town no longer has to remain a protest in one town.
Someone records it.
Someone uploads the video.
People elsewhere see that others are angry too.
Then they realise something politically important:
I am not the only person who feels this way.
That can change collective behaviour incredibly quickly.
Authoritarian governments possess an advantage when dissatisfied citizens are isolated from one another.
Imagine one million people privately oppose a government, but each person believes almost everybody else supports it.
Nobody protests.
The government appears overwhelmingly popular.
Then people suddenly discover that thousands of others share their dissatisfaction.
The political calculation changes.
This helps explain why governments that tightly control traditional media are so concerned about social media.
Information does not merely tell people what happened.
It tells people what other people believe.
And that can become political power.
Which is why shutting down the internet matters
Internet disruptions during the protests are therefore not just a technical inconvenience.
They are political.
If protesters use communication networks to coordinate demonstrations and circulate images, restricting those networks makes organising more difficult.
The Cuban government argues that social media has also been used from outside the country to manipulate information and encourage unrest.
That concern is not completely imaginary.
Foreign governments and political organisations absolutely do use information strategically.
False photographs and misleading claims can spread rapidly during political crises.
But the possibility of misinformation cannot justify eliminating access to information altogether.
Otherwise every authoritarian government receives an extremely convenient argument:
Some people online are lying, therefore nobody should be allowed to communicate.
The better response to bad information is more reliable information.
Not darkness.
Biden has inherited an awkward policy
This also creates an interesting problem for President Biden.
Barack Obama attempted a major opening towards Cuba.
Diplomatic relations were restored in 2015.
Travel and economic restrictions were loosened.
The basic argument was that decades of isolation had failed to produce political change, so engagement might work better.
Donald Trump reversed much of that approach.
Now Biden has inherited the question.
And this week’s protests make both strategies difficult to defend with complete confidence.
Supporters of sanctions can argue that pressure is finally exposing the weakness of the Cuban government.
But if sanctions contribute to shortages experienced by ordinary Cubans, increasing them could punish exactly the people supposedly being supported.
Supporters of engagement can argue that opening Cuba would reduce hardship and weaken the government’s ability to blame America.
But economic engagement does not guarantee political liberalisation.
Again, there is no clean policy.
The question is what America actually wants.
If the objective is punishing the Cuban government, sanctions can accomplish that.
If the objective is improving the lives of Cuban citizens, the calculation becomes more complicated.
If the objective is producing democratic political change, then sixty years of embargo should at least make us ask whether the mechanism is working.
A policy can continue for so long that its existence becomes confused with evidence of its effectiveness.
Those are not the same thing.
The government cannot blame Washington for arrests
There is one area where responsibility seems much clearer.
How the Cuban government responds to peaceful political dissent is the responsibility of the Cuban government.
The United States did not force Cuban authorities to arrest demonstrators.
The embargo does not require internet restrictions.
Food shortages do not require suppressing criticism.
A government can reasonably argue that foreign pressure contributes to an economic crisis while still being responsible for how it treats citizens who complain about that crisis.
This distinction is important because governments frequently use external threats to delegitimise internal criticism.
If protesters are angry while a foreign adversary is also criticising the government, it becomes politically convenient to merge the two:
The protesters are serving the enemy.
But citizens do not stop having legitimate grievances because another government happens to agree with them.
A Cuban can oppose American sanctions and oppose the Cuban government.
They can want political reform without wanting Washington to determine Cuba’s future.
Again, people do not have to choose the geopolitical team that outsiders have assigned them.
Revolutions eventually have to govern
The Cuban Revolution happened in 1959.
That was sixty-two years ago.
For decades, the government’s political identity has remained tied to revolution: resistance, sovereignty, anti-imperialism and the achievements associated with Fidel Castro’s overthrow of the Batista dictatorship.
But eventually every revolutionary government encounters the same problem.
A revolution explains how you obtained power.
It cannot indefinitely explain what you do with it.
People born decades after 1959 did not personally overthrow Batista.
Their political expectations are shaped by the country they live in now.
Can they find work?
Can they afford food?
Can they criticise their government?
Can they leave?
Do they believe their lives will improve?
Historical legitimacy depreciates.
A government may derive enormous authority from having liberated a country, won a war or founded a new political system.
But each new generation has less personal memory of that achievement.
Eventually legitimacy has to come from performance.
That may be one of the deeper challenges Cuba is confronting.
Are these protests the beginning of the end?
Nobody knows.
And I think predictions of imminent regime collapse are usually more exciting than useful.
Authoritarian governments can survive enormous protests.
They control security institutions.
Opposition movements can be divided.
Demonstrations can disappear once immediate economic conditions improve or repression increases.
Cuba’s government has survived crises before, including the extraordinary economic collapse that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
So the existence of large protests does not automatically mean the political system is about to fall.
But the protests still matter.
They reveal information.
They show that dissatisfaction exists at a scale the government cannot completely conceal.
They show that economic hardship can overcome fear, at least temporarily.
And they show that a generation connected through the internet may be more difficult to politically isolate than previous generations were.
What happens next depends partly on whether the government interprets that information as a warning or merely as an enemy to suppress.
Who is responsible?
Probably more than one actor.
The United States bears responsibility for maintaining an embargo designed precisely to create economic pressure.
The pandemic bears responsibility for destroying tourism and placing extraordinary strain on Cuba’s economy and health system.
The Cuban government bears responsibility for decades of economic policy and for restricting political freedoms.
And individual Cuban officials bear responsibility for how protesters are treated now.
That answer is less satisfying than choosing one villain.
But political causation is rarely a courtroom in which only one defendant can be guilty.
Different actors can contribute to the same outcome through completely different mechanisms.
The difficult part is determining how much explanatory weight each deserves.
That is a much better question than asking which political ideology gets to claim Cuba as evidence.
Because somewhere underneath the arguments about socialism, capitalism, sanctions and revolution are ordinary Cubans waiting for electricity, medicine and food.
They are not evidence in somebody else’s ideological debate.
They are the people politics is supposed to work for.
And whatever explanation Cuba’s government or America’s government gives for their suffering, that seems like the standard against which both should ultimately be judged.
