In Gaza or Sudan there is hunger. In Cuba too, and no United Nations (UN) Security Council is dedicated to addressing this issue.
It is evident that the political or geostrategic circumstances are very different, without a doubt, but the feeling that citizens suffer is identical.
The Havana regime is going through the worst moment in its recent history since the special period that was decreed after the fall of that source of wealth that was the USSR in times of the Cold War. He has even gone so far as to beg the World Food Programme, an organization integrated into the UN, to urgently receive the supply of powdered milk for children under seven years of age.
This past Sunday there were demonstrations in the capital and other cities. Unlike the markedly political protests on other occasions, this time experts described them as a rare public display of disenchantment with the island’s communist Executive. Apparently, the marches were not called by the organized opposition, but by parents who struggle daily to feed their children.
Various witnesses indicated that the protests started on Sunday when some mothers went to a government building to complain that they could not feed their children. They repeated the slogan “we are hungry.”
The Cuban Government lives in the most absolute contradiction. Policymakers are pushing every button at their disposal to get the attention of the Biden Administration in the midst of the worst economic crisis in decades and connect it with the openness that came with Barack Obama’s mandate.
If Miguel Díaz-Canel’s Executive ever had hope that US President Joe Biden would revoke the stricter restrictions imposed by his predecessor, Donald Trump, that is now causing diplomatic fires. Instead of tempering the tension, the rulers of Havana are exponentially increasing accusations of interventionism and the insensitivity of the United States to human suffering on the island.
Díaz-Canel himself once again blamed the shortage on the US embargo and warned that “American terrorists” are promoting dissent at the cost of hunger.
The Cuban Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, contacted the person in charge of trade affairs, Benjamin Ziff, to give him a note of protest. In that text he rejected “the interventionist behavior and defamatory messages of the United States Government and its embassy in Cuba regarding internal affairs of the Cuban reality.”
State Department spokesman Vedant Patel told reporters that “the United States is not behind these protests.” The spokesperson noted that the “accusations are absurd.”
Cuba depends largely on its allies – Russia and Venezuela, which are also not at all superfluous – to supply itself with food and fuel. But the island’s serious economic collapse means that the peso has lost almost all of its value.
The Government increased the price of fuel this March by 400% as part of an effort to stabilize the crisis and control the spiral of inflation, which officially stands at 30%. There is a suspicion that the real rate is probably higher.
Non-governmental sources assured that electricity blackouts last up to 18 hours a day. This circumstance means that residents cannot keep the little food they have in the refrigerator and, on the contrary, see how it spoils in the tropical climate. In these latest marches, protesters chanted: “Without electricity or food, people get hot.”
More than 400,000 Cubans left the island and fled to the United States in the last two and a half years, since the large political and economic protests were recorded.
