A striking image is circulating this week on social media in
Cuba: A dissident pumping his fist in the air, handcuffs dangling from one
wrist, after friends and neighbors helped him evade arrest by police in Havana.
اضافة اعلان
The image is a screenshot from a video showing rapper Maykel
Castillo celebrating his escape, surrounded by other dissidents and residents
of Havana’s rundown San Isidro neighborhood on Sunday. Some join him singing an
anti-government song and insulting President Miguel Diaz-Canel.
Castillo told Reuters by phone from his home that the arrest
attempt was another in a string of arbitrary detentions to intimidate him and
others in the dissident artists collective, the Havana-based San Isidro
Movement (MSI).
Asked about Sunday’s incident, the Foreign Ministry’s
International Press Center, which fields all requests from foreign journalists
for comment from state entities, told Reuters that there would be no comment.
State media such as ruling Communist Party newspaper Granma
have in the past five months called Castillo and the MSI part of a US-directed
“soft coup” attempt, charges they deny. The government generally denounces
dissidents as members of tiny groups paid by the United States to stir up
unrest and further its decades-old efforts to overthrow the government.
To those who want the end of the one-party state, Castillo,
37 and also known by his stage name Maykel Osorbo, is a hero. To others he is a
social misfit.
The image circulated on social media shows how while public
dissent in Cuba is still uncommon, it is becoming less so. This is partly due
to access to mobile internet and because frustrations with the government are
growing amid the island’s worst economic crisis in decades, half a dozen analysts
and Western diplomats interviewed by Reuters said.
Tough US sanctions and the pandemic, which have gutted
tourism, have cut into foreign exchange earnings and battered the largely
state-run economy, which contracted 11 percent in 2020. There have been increased
shortages of basics like medicine and food.
The MSI has staged provocative performances and exhibitions
documented online since it was created three years ago, first largely about
censorship but now also on daily hardships.
The “artivist” movement has expanded organized public
dissent beyond traditional political activism, attracting support from sectors
of the broader artistic community and some ordinary citizens. There are no
independent opinion polls so it is not possible to say how wide this support
is.
Speaking at the MSI headquarters, a dilapidated 1920s
building, one of its main organizers, Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara, 33, told
Reuters that 80–90 percent of its funding came directly from the artists
themselves, through artwork sales or crowdfunding.
The MSI’s latest performance, which included handing out
candies to children, aimed to underscore the fact families in poor
neighborhoods like theirs could no longer even afford sweets due to state
economic mismanagement, he said.
Otero Alcantara said the fact ordinary citizens sided with
the MSI against the police and joined in a protest on Sunday showed they were
beginning to overcome their fear of authority and the consequences of speaking
up, he said.
“This neighborhood is an example of what is happening across
Cuba, not just here,” Otero Alcantara said. “It’s just that as artists, we are
more visible.”
Spreading frustrations
Small protests — whether over censorship, red tape deemed
excessive or animal rights — have popped up nationwide in recent years.
Analysts say the launch of mobile internet in 2018 was a
game changer because it allowed Cubans to get information outside traditional
state-controlled mass media, and mobilize.
“This allows one person’s or one community’s frustration and
dissent to spread in real time so that others who harbor similar frustrations
will also learn that they are not alone and lose their fear of speaking out,”
said Ted Henken at Baruch College in New York, author of “Cuba’s Digital
Revolution”.
Internet access has allowed new online non-state media
outlets to emerge and also let Cuban activists on the island better connect
with the large Cuban American diaspora that emerged after Fidel Castro’s
leftist revolution in 1959.
The anti-government song “Patria y Vida” (“Homeland and
Life”) that San Isidro residents intoned on Sunday was a hit released in
February by some of Cuba’s most popular contemporary musicians who now live in
Miami, like reggaaeton duo Gente de Zona. The song also featured Castillo and
another dissident rapper on the island.
Dissident group the Patriotic Union of Cuba, headquartered
in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba, says dozens of its activists have been
on hunger strike for three weeks, protesting what it says is state harassment
that has prevented them from delivering food and medicines to needy residents.
The group is posting pictures on social media of the hunger strikers.
Reuters was unable to independently verify the strike.
State media have dismissed it as a “show”.
On Thursday, Julie Chung, the US State Department’s acting
assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, said on Twitter Washington
was alarmed by the “worsening situation” regarding the hunger strike.
‘Old playbook’
The Cuba government has addressed some specific issues
raised by dissidents, for example announcing in February it was introducing a
decree on animal rights.
It has attacked critics who want a complete political
overhaul, like the MSI and the independent journalists covering public dissent.
State television has dedicated hours of prime time in recent months to
dismissing them as the “new actors of the old playbook” — a US soft coup
attempt.
The US State Department declined to directly address a
Reuters’ question about Havana’s view that Washington and US groups finance
dissidents in a bid to destabilize it.
“We support those in civil society, in Cuba and around the
world, who are defending their rights or struggling for freedom,” a State
Department spokesperson said.
Some activists and independent journalists have publicly
stated that they are not directed by the United States, though they acknowledge
that they receive foreign grants including from US organizations like the
National Endowment for Democracy, funded largely by the US Congress.
Dissidents like the MSI members have documented on social
media repeated house arrests and other types of harassment. At least 10
prominent journalists for non-state media have left Cuba in recent years after
complaining of state pressure, according to an informal count by Reuters.
Still, some dissidents told Reuters they are undeterred.
“As much as they try to discredit the work we are doing, it
doesn’t work,” Castillo said. “I am not anyone’s agent. I am a free citizen. I
have family in the United States and friends and supporters that help me, and
my artwork.”
