On This 3rd Anniversary of 11J
This is my first post. Hang on tight.
Hola. Thanks for checking out the first issue of @Cubacurious, a weekly dollop of news from the Cuban underground. Each Thursday I’ll sum up, in English, three recent scoops from two respected daily Spanish-language podcasts: Yoani Sanchez’s Cafecito Informativo (Havana) and Diario de Cuba’s Cuba a Diario (Madrid).
As far as I know, @CubaCurious is the only place where English speakers can get a smattering of news about the real Cuba from these two podcasts. English versions of the sites’ articles are sometimes available, but there are no brief descriptions in English of those articles or the topics covered on the podcasts.
A reminder for anyone who doesn’t follow Cuba news closely: independent journalism is illegal in Cuba, which is one of the reasons I follow news from my native country so closely. I want to honor the courage and commitment of the fearless journalists who endure state-approved defamations, harassment, arrests, even imprisonment. I want to hear what they have to say. Every day.
The regime’s near total control of the media, new since the 1959 revolution, eroded (somewhat) when it finally gave citizens access to the mobile internet in December 2018—one of the last countries on the planet to do so. Today, many independent reporters are being held alongside common criminals in prisons described by Human Rights Watch as “horrendous.” They have three options: stay silent, risk prison, or leave the country. They can also wait for the authorities to forcibly exile them, as happened to Abraham Jimenez Enoa, in 2021, for reporting on the regime’s human rights violations.
Harsh punishment hasn’t silenced all of Cuba’s independent reporters. Many have left the island during the mass exodus of recent years (a recent report by a prominent Cuban economist estimates that roughly 18% of the population emigrated between 2022 and 2023). But other independent reporters continue to risk their and their families’ safety each time they write, speak, distribute flyers, or post anything even glancingly critical of the regime.
They pay a high price for their stubborn commitment to true journalism. Last month, Lazaro Yuri Valle Roca, who had been imprisoned since 2021, was finally released and put on a plane to Miami. He’d been serving a five-year sentence for “spreading enemy propaganda” and “resisting authority.”
The reality is, he’d dared to report on human rights activists who were distributing flyers in Old Havana. The flyers had quotes by patriot-poet José Martí and independence fighter and leader Antonio Maceo. This Tuesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists called out the Cuban authorities after they detained and threatened José Luis Tan Estrada, who’d announced plans to report on the 3rd anniversary of the historic pro-democracy uprising known in Cuba as 11J.
Tens of thousands of Cubans took to the streets across the country on that Sunday, July 11, 2021, in spontaneous and overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations. The regime blamed foreign (US) mercenaries for the trouble. But the calls of “down with the dictatorship” and “patria y vida” (homeland and life,” a twist on the revolutionary slogan “homeland or death”) were unmistakably Cuban. Rather than calling for calm, “president” Miguel Díaz Canel went on state run television and commanded Cuba’s “revolutionaries” to combat their fellow citizens. Images of the violence that followed spread across the internet: bloodied unarmed protestors, plainclothes police attacking people with iron rods, shock troops marching into neighborhoods, policemen shooting into crowds, house-to-house raids using attack dogs.
So today, on the 3rd anniversary of the uprising, I’m offering my first update from Cuba’s underground newsrooms. With more than 1000 known political prisoners behind bars, the economy in freefall, and no meaningful reporting on the situation in our mainstream media (excluding the Miami Herald), I hope to give you something of value here.
I’d love to hear from you. Please tell me what you’d like to learn about, questions that come up, thoughts about any and all you find in @CubaCurious.
July 4th — July 11th 2024
Scoop número uno: Cuban dissidents, independent journalists, activists—and others—reported waking on July 10th to no internet access, a common occurrence on the anniversaries of previous protests, or on days when world news is focused on human rights, such as International Human Rights Day (December 10th). Many reported being threatened and having cell service cut off as well. Heightened police presence was reported in across Havana. The speculation, based on past events, is that the government, on the eve of the 3rd anniversary of the countrywide protests of July 11, 2021, is silencing opponents to reduce the possibility of new protests.
Why it matters: 11J proved to the world that the regime’s 60+-year-old narrative is a lie. Cuba isn’t a socialist utopia, full of happy people marching in lockstep with an ideology. The regime needs to erase the fact of those historic protests in order to sustain its myths.
Scoop número dos: A new independent report estimates an 18% decline in Cuba’s population, primarily through emigration but also due to a declining birthrate, between 2022 and 2023. Respected economist and demographer Juan Carlos Albisu-Campos calculates 1.79 million Cubans left the island during that period and sets the actual Cuban population at 8.62 million people. This unprecedented decline is roughly 3 times greater than the total of all post-revolutionary mass emigration waves combined. Roughly 620,000 Cubans have left in mass exoduses like the Freedom Flights, Mariel Boatlift, 1994 Balseros, among others.
Why it matters: people are missing at family gatherings, at school, in offices, doctors and nurses when Cubans arrive in a panic at an emergency room—all signs of a failed system that drives people to escape. Cuba’s most precious resource, human capital, is fleeing the island when its talent, energy, and skills are most needed.
Scoop número tres: A recent livestock census in Matanzas province reveals that farmers have under reported the number of livestock they own. Farmers have hidden true livestock counts in the past to avoid selling milk and beef to the state at lower prices than they can get on the black market. Farmers must sell their products to the state first, at the prices it sets and in the volumes it expects based on reported livestock counts. But the state often doesn’t pay farmers even the low prices it sets after receiving their products, and farmers complain bitterly about the practice.
Why it matters: during a time of great scarcity, farmers are letting milk and beef go to waste rather than turning it over, essentially for free, to the state under the conditions it sets. The state’s centralized economy is denying farmers the economic freedom they need to increase production. But the excuses on state run media point at the embargo or farmers’ self-interest.
Thanks for reading and thinking about all of this with me. If you’re interested in shaping what I post next Thursday, I’d love to hear from you. Let’s create this together.