Leaders beef up police patrols after rare protests

HAVANA (AP):

Cuban police are out in force on the country’s streets as the president is accusing Cuban Americans of using social media to spur a rare outpouring of weekend protests over high prices and food shortages.

The demonstrations in several cities and towns were some of the biggest displays of anti-government sentiment seen in years in tightly controlled Cuba, which is facing a surge of coronavirus cases as it struggles with its worst economic crisis in decades as a consequence of US sanctions imposed by President Donald Trump’s administration.

Many young people took part in Sunday’s demonstrations in Havana. Protests were also held elsewhere on the island, including in the small town of San Antonio de los Baños, where people objected to power outages and were visited by President Miguel Díaz-Canel. He entered a few homes, where he took questions from residents.

Authorities appeared determined to put a stop to the demonstrations. More than a dozen protesters were detained, including a leading Cuban dissident who was arrested trying to attend a march in the city of Santiago, 559 miles (900 kilometres) east. The demonstrators disrupted traffic in the capital for several hours until some threw rocks and police moved in and broke them up.

Internet service was spotty, possibly indicating an effort to prevent protesters from communicating with each other.

“We’ve seen how the campaign against Cuba was growing on social media in the past few weeks,” Díaz-Canel said Monday in a nationally televised appearance in which his entire Cabinet was present. “That’s the way it’s done: Try to create inconformity, dissatisfaction by manipulating emotions and feelings.”

In a statement Monday, US President Joe Biden said Cuban protesters were asserting their basic rights.

“We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime,″ Biden said.

The US urges the Cuban government to serve their people “rather than enriching themselves”, Biden added.

UN deputy spokesman Farhan Haq on Monday stressed the UN position “on the need for freedom of expression and peaceful assembly to be respected fully, and we expect that that will be the case”.

The demonstrations were extremely unusual on an island where little dissent against the government is tolerated. The last major public demonstration of discontent, over economic hardship, took place nearly 30 years ago in 1994. Last year, there were small demonstrations by artists and other groups, but nothing as big or widespread as what erupted this past weekend.

The US has, so far at least, not detected any surge of migrants from Cuba, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters in Washington on Tuesday.

He also cautioned Cubans that any migrants intercepted at sea are returned to their homelands or sent to other countries under long-standing agreements intended to discourage people from trying to make the dangerous crossing.