The Cuban government is promoting November 15 as a day of celebration, when the Caribbean island will re-open its borders to tourism.
“Cuba is a safe destination” proclaims one slick advertisement, which invites international visitors to experience the friendliness of the nation and the “peacefulness of its streets”. Some 400 international flights a week are scheduled, after 20 months of restrictions due to the pandemic.
No mention is made on official channels of another event planned for that same day: for weeks, a group of government opponents has been planning a march in Havana and other cities to demand basic civil liberties. The organisers insist the protests are legal, under the country’s constitution, and wrote to the authorities last month asking for permission.
Predictably, the requests were denied. Communist Cuba has not allowed any opposition protests since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution. The organisers of the planned demonstrations have since been warned formally that if they go ahead they risk imprisonment, but that has not deterred them.
“November 15 has to happen,” declared Yunior Garcia, 39, a theatre director who has emerged as a leader of the country’s new opposition movement. “We need to be heard”.
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He has been emboldened by the events of an extraordinary day last summer. On July 11, hundreds of Cubans took to the streets in at least 40 towns and cities, apparently spontaneously, expressing anger after weeks of shortages and power cuts. Many openly called for freedom. It was the biggest demonstration of public anger in more than six decades.
After the protests, which had been co-ordinated via social media, Garcia set up a Facebook site called “Archipiélago” to promote debate about the political future of Cuba. It has attracted more than 30,000 followers — and has turned the artist, who for years worked in state-run theatrical productions and whose talent was once praised by government ministers, into the regime’s public enemy No 1.
The full force of the Cuban state has been used to intimidate and discredit him. Last week state television broadcast an interview with a man who had joined Garcia and other dissidents at two seminars held at a Madrid university in 2019. The man, a doctor called Carlos Leonardo Vázquez González, said that he went to the seminars pretending to be a dissident, but was in fact an undercover state security spy known as “agent Fernando”.
He claimed, without evidence, that he witnessed Garcia plotting a violent overthrow of the Cuban regime, under the direction of foreign powers.
Garcia has dismissed the allegations, saying he and others in Madrid had always been suspicious of the doctor, who said very little but took an unusual number of photos during the seminars. But he does not underestimate the risk he faces. “We know we can go to prison, we know terrible things can happen,” he told NBC News in a series of WhatsApp messages last month. “We are already living them.”
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Last month, in an apparent warning, Garcia woke to find that a headless chicken and bloodied feathers had been left at the doorstep to his apartment. On Monday this week a group of government supporters congregated outside his home to chant slogans and warn him to stop his activism.
State-run media has begun broadcasting intimidating images of civilians patrolling the streets with metal batons, on the pretext that the revolution stands ready defend itself against all threats.
Cubalex, a group which monitors legal processes on the island, has said 1,175 Cubans were arrested after the July 11 protests. Many have claimed they were taken away by police for doing nothing more than filming the demonstrations.
The public discontent is not purely about political freedoms: the Cuban government has been grappling for months with the most serious economic crisis it has faced since the fall of its former benefactor, the Soviet Union, in the early 1990s.
The coronavirus pandemic destroyed tourism, while chronic internal inefficiencies, US sanctions, and a drop in support from its crisis-wracked ally, Venezuela, made a bad situation worse. Inflation officially stands at 60 per cent, but is believed to be running closer to 7,000 per cent on the black market.
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President Diaz-Canel, 61, who took over as head of the Communist Party from Raúl Castro in April, has approved some reforms, including the lifting of certain restrictions on small businesses. But implementation has been exceptionally slow, with many suspecting that old communist hardliners behind the scenes are blocking all significant change.
In Havana, many see tourism as the only hope for the country, or at least their own immediate economic survival. “I totally sympathise with Yunior Garcia. He is right about almost everything.” one Airbnb host, who asked that his name not be published, told The Times. “But protests now, when the tourists are finally returning? I’m sorry, I just can’t support that.”
