What role have technology and social networks played in the crisis in Cuba?

(CNN Spanish) – A series of protests on Sunday in various locations in Cuba has left more than 150 people detained or with unknown whereabouts, according to Human Rights Watch and the Cubalex human rights center, and at least one death, confirmed by the Ministry of Interior. These are the largest demonstrations registered on the island in decades, with thousands of people complaining about the economic crisis and shortages, fueled by the covid-19 pandemic, and with the impulse of social networks.

The organization Cuba Decides It also reported that at least 151 people have been arrested or are missing, and published the list with their names on social networks. Among the detainees is the journalist Camila Acosta, according to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Spain, José Manuel Albares, who asked for their release.

The Cuban government has not yet ruled on these alleged detentions.

The San Isidro Movement, which advocates for greater artistic expression in Cuba and is very active on social media, also published a list of activists allegedly detained by the authorities.

The demonstrations began in San Antonio de los Baños, west of Havana, when hundreds of Cubans took to the streets to protest after nearly a week of power outages during the sweltering July heat. “It’s been six days with only 12 hours of power each day. That was one of the things that set this off,” a city resident told CNN.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has blamed the US embargo for recent protests against the economic situation. In statements on television, Díaz-Canel said that it was explained to the population that they were going to “enter a difficult period, of difficulties and economic deficiencies” since 2019 when they began to apply the “restrictive measures” and a “policy of sanctions “in the government of Donald Trump.

In addition, at the end of his appearance, he said that “the order to fight has been given, the revolutionaries need to be in the streets.”

Impact on social networks

The images and videos of these demonstrations were widely shared on social networks, and Cubans began to take to the streets of their towns throughout the country, starting a series of protests whose scale had not been recorded since the “maleconazo” of 1994. .

In this way, the massive access to social networks, which in Cuba is relatively recent, seems to have contributed to expanding the scale of the protests. On Monday there were reports of an internet blackout that would have been ordered by the government, which prevented Cubans from sharing images of the demonstrations.

“Much of what is happening now is the product of ordinary Cuban access to the world through communications,” Eduardo Gamarra, professor of international politics at Florida International University, told CNN.

While Pedro López, director of the Cuban National Coordinator – made up of organizations in exile – said that “the impact of social networks on the protests in recent days has been fundamental.”

“The impact was huge,” said Andy Gomez, a former dean of the University of Miami and a specialist in Cuban affairs. “Because the protests on Sunday were not organized by any opposition, but by standing Cubans,” he added. “They are going to administer it in a much more tied and controlled way after what happened on Sunday.”

The Cuban-American artist Gloria Estefan told CNN that Cuba “has been an island that has known how to repress and control information, which entered and left as much as its people, but the time has come when that is opening up and has caused great problems for government”.

“The worst enemy of Cuba at the moment is technology, because we have telephones, Instagram, Twitter, luckily there have been images of the abuse and repression that they have had for more than 60 years, but at that time it did not come out absolutely nothing, “said producer and businessman Emilio Estefan.

Amaury Pacheco, a poet and member of the San Isidro Movement, told CNN in April, after a protest by artists in Havana against the government, that this was “a great and unusual moment.” “A generation that has connected with social networks. It is very important, the networks – Facebook, Twitter, others – have come to energize the life and opinion of Cubans, and that has borne these fruits.”

The demonstration was held to the sound of the song “Patria y vida”, launched in early February by Cuban artists Yotuel Romero, Gente de Zona, Descemer Bueno, Osorbo and El Funky and marked by a message of disenchantment. The video in Youtube It quickly went viral.

The case of the Cuban singer Ramón Eusebio López Díaz, known as “El Invasor”, has also resonated, who broadcast his apparent arrest by the Cuban police from his Facebook account live.

The slow expansion of the internet in Cuba

In 2013, the government of Cuba installed fiber optic internet on the island, accessible through so-called telepoints -cibercafés- and in the Wi-Fi zones in public squares, which began a new era in the communications of the country by allowing the irruption of social networks and contact with international media for the first time.

By 2017, the penetration of social networks had grown by 346%, according to government data, and the advancement and popularity of the internet seemed unstoppable.

Already in that same year, the then first vice president of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, remarked that “in social networks there is a very important and transcendental ideological debate, a debate that tries to dismantle the ideological bases of the Cuban Revolution. There is a whole platform of ideological subversion that works on these social networks ”.

Controlled by the state company Etecsa, 2019 estimates cited in the report of Freedom house Regarding connectivity in Cuba, he points out that there would be a total of 682 telepoints and 1,513 Wi-Fi points on the island. In 2016, the home internet service – Nauta Hogar – was offered for the first time, which in 2019 had 124,000 subscribers throughout the country.

The costs are high and the speeds are low, and the main form of connection continues to be through cell phones: in Cuba there are about 3.18 million cell phones with the capacity to navigate within the country, according to Freedom House.

Thus, Cuba has one of the lowest connectivity rates in the region: it reaches 61.8% of the population, according to the latest data from the World Bank, below the 65.8% average for Latin America. Although these numbers include connections in controlled networks in work and school settings, and household penetration reached 18% in 2020, according to Freedom house based on data from the Inclusive Internet Index.

The “access to the world”

Eduardo Gamarra recalled that during the internal crisis after the fall of the USSR, which led to the massive protests of the early 1990s – the so-called “special period” – the Cuban government began to implement a series of small openings.

“The Castro government showed small signs of wanting to open the system, by freeing up private initiative and access to communications,” he said. “Today the Castros are no longer there, and it is a society that they have already opened to and are trying to close. That is very difficult.”

For Arturo Lopez Levy, professor of international relations at Holy Names University, the protests covered much of the country and took place simultaneously, partly thanks to connectivity. “The internet served not only to coordinate, but also because it allowed some narratives, even absurd and arising from Miami, that the government ignored to gain traction”

“In Cuba you don’t see protests every day or every year. Partly because of the government’s system of coercion, and partly because an important part of the population conceives difficulties as a form of resistance to imperialism,” he said.

Pedro López, also director of the Cuban Liberal Party, said the 1994 protests were controlled by the government and could not spread to other parts of the country. “When other provinces found out they had already finished.”

“In the case of Sunday there was a call through the networks to demonstrate, and at the first protest in San Antonio de los Baños people found out, they were connected and self-convened through social networks,” he said, highlighting that among the Young protesters, born after the Cuban Revolution, were the majority.

Analyst Andy Gomez added that the Internet “has played a very interesting role for Cuban youth.”

“To many it opened their eyes to how the rest of the world lives, and that caused a very great psychological drama, because what they learned in school they began to see that the world was different,” he said.

With information from Patrick Oppmann, Alejandra Oraa, Fernando del Rincón and Florencia Trucco.