In Cuba, dates significant to the Revolution have traditionally been highlighted on billboards, concrete walls and signs from Pinar del Rio to Santiago.
"11 de julio" is rising to prominence, marking the day when Cuba's citizens reached a breaking point. Mass protests rolled across the battered island in numbers not seen for decades. The movement was bolstered by WhatsApp, Facebook and other sites that enabled participants to send live footage of the protests and the subsequent repressive government response to friends and family off the island. Videos from virtually every province confirmed the unusual scale of the movement.
The internet, a relatively new tool for Cubans, who largely lacked access prior to former President Barack Obama's brief period of engagement, has since been even spottier than usual with some sites intermittently blocked by the government. Cuba's internet infrastructure has China's handwriting all over it, thanks to the vacuum left by America's diplomatic withdrawal.
The Cuban government has called for all communist revolutionaries to "defend the revolution" and staged a counterprotest on Havana's Malecón boulevard last weekend along with their own social media image and video campaign. But the massive scale of unrest will make it difficult to put the genie back in the bottle, as Latin America expert Ted Henken at Baruch College, City University of New York, noted last week.
The eruption of protests had been preceded by an uptick in Cuban migrants leaving the island by "boat" (rafts, rústicos and paddleboards), which is likely to increase. Cubans are no strangers to isolation and hardship after 60-plus years of U.S. embargo. But the combination of COVID lockdown, the absence of U.S. tourism and a U.S.-imposed stranglehold on family remittances — all on top of a slow vaccine rollout and currency changes that have sent inflation skyrocketing — have produced a situation desperate enough to prompt Cubans to risk a dangerous migration.
Our hemisphere is full of migrants fleeing difficult economic and political circumstances. But America's hard-line stance on Cuba has accelerated this humanitarian crisis in tandem with its own government's failures.
Is Cuba entering its own Arab Spring? Will a primavera cubana finally force President Joe Biden's hand, or will he continue to watch and wait, angling for Miami votes as refugees surge into the Florida straits? While Biden has moved quickly to return the U.S. to the international stage, rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, meeting with European leaders and pledging to donate 80 million vaccine doses around the world, his gaze has fallen past one of our closest neighbors.
Despite campaign promises, Biden's inaction on Cuba in the face of its desperate economic situation lands him squarely in the same camp as his predecessor. On the island, initial euphoria over Biden's presidency has faded into bitter cynicism — more fuel for the current fire escalating an already troubling humanitarian situation.
Cuban-born Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned Cuban and Haitian migrants not to come to the U.S. by sea, yet the Biden administration has taken no steps to reinstate the Cuban family reunification parole program which was shuttered when the embassy staff was drawn down in 2017. With no legal options available even to families who have submitted paperwork and paid hundreds of dollars in fees, illegal migration will no doubt continue to increase as food scarcity worsens. The specter of more bodies lost off the coast of Florida should trouble the conscience of a White House that has taken pains to differentiate itself from predecessors.
U.S. intervention in Cuba in particular and Latin America in general has produced disaster after disaster and is not an option, calls from hard-line Florida officials notwithstanding. However, the Biden administration's recent statements are a tepid nonresponse in light of the actions that could immediately ease the suffering of the Cuban people. Here is where an active diplomatic presence on the ground would be helpful to bring in and oversee the distribution of food and aid; instead, the staff in the U.S. Embassy in Havana remains a skeleton crew despite reports that more than 20 diplomats in Vienna are now reported to have experienced "Havana syndrome"-like symptoms.
The U.S., having squandered its opportunity to be a player on the ground in Cuba in 2017, now must work twice as hard to mobilize NGOs and aid organizations with active ties to Cuban civil society to help them deliver relief to a desperate populace.
Cuban American family members, many of whom took to the streets in solidarity with the protests, should be permitted to send unlimited remittances to hungry relatives. American travel restrictions should be loosened to allow more direct aid to flow in the form of not only of dollars but of the soap, cooking oil and toothbrushes that used to fill suitcases traveling from Miami to Havana. Consular services must be restored and the embassy restaffed, and we must rebuild trust with our neighbors through soft diplomacy and people-to-people connections.
Removing Cuba from the list of state sponsors of international terrorism, one of the last matches Trump threw over his shoulder, is a thornier political move, but one that would allow Cuba to secure international financing to pull itself out of a major recession — and help prevent more migrants setting out for Florida. For an administration that has made a point of tying foreign policy to domestic policy, that's a calculation not to be overlooked.
While the rest of the world welcomes American re-engagement, 90 miles away, the long wait for American humanity drags on.
Rena Kraut, of Minneapolis, is executive director, Cuban American Youth Orchestra.
