Juan Antonio Blanco, a Cuban-American now the Executive Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Initiativess at Miami Dade College in Florida with a PhD in history from the University of Havana and extensive Cuban and international experience, [1] has offered the following perspective on the third anniversary of the 9/11 Cuban protests.[2]
“The great significance of the 2021 national rebellion is that it showed that the majority of the population rejected a failed and repressive regime. The idea that the people lived happily in that society was a fabricated fallacy exported to the world.”
“The great lesson that was reiterated on [that] July 11 is that nothing is achieved from a dictatorship without confronting it. Let us remember that the epic protest known as the Maleconazo of 1994 immediately brought about the opening of free markets for peasants and self-employment, the free circulation of the dollar, an immigration agreement with the United States and new facilities for foreign investment.”
“11J brought about—finally!—the long-delayed approval of MSMEs [Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises] announced by presidential decree on August 19 (five weeks after the popular rebellion!) which was later published as a law in the Official Gazette on September 21. It also led the government to consider that by facilitating a mass exodus to the US it would get rid of all the rioters and even reap financial benefits. This was how they conceived it and agreed with Nicaragua and the Mexican cartels close to Havana.”
“The myth of governability was shattered and has not been able to be put back together to this day. Until 11J, it seemed that the Cuban people were content, if not resigned, to living under that system and that the opposition was reduced to a few thousand dissatisfied citizens who were grouped in different organizations of independent civil society. However, that day it was clear that, in addition to the organized opposition, there was also a very broad dissidence, understood as a deep citizen discontent that encompassed millions of people throughout the country.”
“Since then —and this is already a legacy of that day— the idea that the dissatisfied in Cuba belong to a minority of opponents was definitively broken. It is already known that on the Island there are millions who disagree with the status quo in which they live, not counting the 1.79 million who left between 2022 and 2023. This unorganized dissidence includes disaffected elements of the Government itself, officials, military personnel and others, who suffer the consequences of the current policies that are being applied.”
“However, from then until today, the reaction of the power elite in Cuba has not been to sit down and reflect on the things that needed to be changed to confront this structural and multi-systemic crisis. On the contrary, it has tried to respond to ungovernability with more repression.”
“All the country’s laws have been strengthened to penalize the slightest expression of opposition, but also of dissent. Recently, a 21-year-old girl from Nuevitas, Camagüey, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for uploading content to social networks that the government describes as ‘enemy propaganda’ and ‘sedition.’ This is a clear sign that the regime has not metabolized the essence of the new phenomenon that it is facing, for the first time, in 65 years. The government does not fully understand that repression can temporarily contain a social explosion, but it does not provide governability in the medium and long term.”
“To gain governability, the only thing that could be done is to change the governance regime, the system of government that has ruled until today and that remains basically totalitarian, because not even a genuine private enterprise exists in the country. The much-hyped MSME Law was conceived to be both a measure to appease the population five weeks after the July 11 protests and a new strategy to circumvent the embargo. What is required to support a private sector in Cuba is to change Cuban laws in a way that guarantees full economic freedom for citizens. The internal blockade is the only thing that prevents this.”
“The famous MSMEs are not genuine private companies, but rather a controlled strategy to try to get the US to recognize them as such and authorize economic, commercial, financial and technological relations with them, something that the Helms-Burton Act does not prevent if they really constituted a private sector, as Madeleine Albright specified on January 5, 1999. But the current MSMEs in Cuba are not that independent private sector to which President Bill Clinton, through his Secretary of State, announced he was willing to open up to US transactions. Various national discriminations and regulations prevent this.”
“The first discrimination imposed by the MSME Law is that one must be authorized by the State to even have a micro-business. The applicant must request a permit that can be denied without any explanation. This reality makes discrimination against the applicant possible for sharing beliefs and ideologies that are not to the liking of the government. The second discrimination consists in that nationals are only authorized to register micro, small and medium-sized companies—in certain sectors, without exceeding limits on their expansion, without freedom to set prices, hire or fire their workers, export and import directly, directly seek foreign investment partners—while large foreign capital is welcomed without most of these restrictions. Why, instead of authorizing MSMEs, are Cuban private companies (EPC) not authorized without any type of limitations?”
“The “SMEs” are people who have finally been allowed to register a business if they manage to pass the filter of ideological and practical loyalty to the Government by not being connected to the opposition or to the critical ideas of this new massive dissidence. These are not the type of businessmen with whom President Clinton wanted to establish bridges. Some of them, to top it off, are managed by those close to the power elite and in other cases they are entities that are really under the control of the military holding company known as GAESA . In these cases they are registered as private entities using front men so that the Cuban oligarchy – and even the Russian one, today sanctioned for the war in Ukraine – can immediately access US banks through them if this is finally authorized.”
“In recent days they have insisted on further strengthening the centralist and statist features of the Soviet economic model, which they imported to the country and which destroyed the Cuban economy, which, together with that of Argentina, Venezuela and Uruguay, occupied the first places in Latin America in 1958. Cuba, the world’s leading sugar exporter in 1958, today imports it.”
“These are the tricks that the Cuban oligarchs are engaged in on this third anniversary of the popular rebellion of 11J: + repression + insistence on statism and government centralism + more international concealment of their private business. They have not learned their lesson.”
“This is the context and meaning of 11J. An explosion that drew the attention of the entire world to the lack of governability in the country and to a power elite that has not yet learned the relevant lessons and insists on its bayonets, without undertaking the radical changes that the country needs and that can only be generated by the freedom and well-being of its population.”
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[1] Blanco is an expert author on Cuba and other topics, former diplomat at the United Nations and the Non-Aligned Movement, founder of the Felix Varela Center (a Cuban non-governmental organization) and Director for International Cooperation at Human Rights and Visiting Assistant Director of the Institute of Cuban Research (Florida International University) and Executive Director of Human Rights Internet. (Juan Antonio Blanco Gil, Wikipedia; Juan Antonio Blanco Gil, Linkedin)
[2] Blanco, Cuba, three years after 11J, Diario de Cuba (July 11,2024). https://diariodecuba.com/cuba/1720712641_55939.html
