Cecilia Bobes, Cuban academic, four years after the protest of July 11: “The Government knows that it has to face a society that no longer endures everything” | Iberoamerica Democracy

Cuba waited almost 27 years from the call MALECONAZO To produce images of his town taking the streets. In 1994, the country was very similar to today: with long hours of blackouts, food shortage and an uncontrollable fury of its people for going to another place. When on July 11, 2021 hundreds of people came out in a mass demonstration, the island was equally economically drowned, but it was no longer the same: there was the Internet (which had been deprived for decades) and there was not the frightening figure of Fidel Castro, but the ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel, who was thrown away from plastic bottles when he appeared to stop the insurrection. “On July 11 there were more than 90 simultaneous boardwalks,” says Cuban academic and researcher Cecilia Bobes, a doctor in Sociology and professor at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (Flacso), in Mexico. The July protest, which has just fulfilled its fourth anniversary, changed Cuba as few events have done in recent times.

Bobes has dedicated himself to systematizing and thinking about the Cuban protest in all its dimension, an analysis embodied in volume Protests in Cuba. Beyond July 11 (Flacso Mexico, 2024), which condenses the outbreak that started in the municipality of San Antonio de los Baños, southwest of Havana, and that in a few hours had been replicated in almost the entire national territory.

The academic had been studying “new social actors” in Cuba and citizen society and civil society, a term that came to the island in the nineties. “From the special period and the reforms that were made, especially economic, the discussion about civil society begins, because areas of autonomy appear for the first time in that society that had been very attached to the State,” he says. However, Bobes ensures that the term of civil society “horrified” the government. “Because subjects that are not politically dissidents began to be visualized within Cuban society, but who want to be autonomous in terms of society, which are distinguished from the State, such as feminisms or Afro -descendants.”

Even so, the researcher considers that until July 11, 2021 there were no mass protests in Cuba, but “contentious actions.” A year earlier, among others, the strike of the San Isidro Movement, which monopolized headlines around the world, or the plant of artists and intellectuals against the Ministry of Culture, in demand of their creative and individual freedoms. These facts were sedimenting the terrain for a greater protest. With a pandemic that finished collapsing the hospitals and closed the doors to tourism, and a country suffocated by the policy of the first administration of Donald Trump, people did not hold and took the streets of the country shouting “hunger”, “medicines” or “down the dictatorship.” Although the government was in charge of stopping it with long and exemplary condemnations to the participants, and although the longest exodus in the history of the country came, the protest of July 11 opened to the Cubans a new horizon before the fed up: the possibility, although repressed, of protesting.

Ask. It is said that the antecedent of July 11 is the Maleconazo, which in August will be 31 years old. But how similar and different are one protest?

Answer. Both are the same type of protest, the street taken by a popular mass in a similar context: the economic crisis, the desire of many to leave the country, repression, the pressure of exile. None of that has changed. But the fundamental difference is that the Maleconazo was a protest that lasted a few hours, in a few streets of Havana. There were even people from the capital who did not find out until after it had passed. Unlike July 11, the Maleconazo was a quickly controlled protest with two elements: the Blas Roca contingent, people dressed as a civilian who begin to give sticks, and the presence of Fidel Castro in the place. Still at that time there was a speech for sovereignty and resistance that mobilized people. On July 11 it was a protest that began in San Antonio de los Baños, and in the two -hour course and Cuba entire was on the street.

P. And the reason is the Internet …

R. On the Internet, people can communicate not only information, but moods. Internet also gives people the possibility to know that they are not alone, that there are many who think the same. It is a means of mobilization, of call. In a country like Cuba, where there is no official channel to convene, the Internet works as a way through which people can be notified. Internet about distant communities that would never be seen if it is not through networks. On July 11, people, with a phone, replied the protest.

P. Those same videos posted on social networks were the government of the government to condemn protesters.

R. Yes. After the protest, (the government) used the videos to identify them and go find their home, one by one. In all protests in the world, including Latin American outbreaks, repression has been in the demonstration: they grab you there. When people stop later, nobody learned who they grabbed and that protest is already dissolved. This effect is not generated that allows people to react at the time against repression; Although on July 11 there were some arrests during the demonstrations.

P. Then the government imposed sentences of up to 20 years in prison. Has people continue to protest despite repression?

R. In 2022 there were more protests than in 2021, although they were not simultaneous such as July 11, which was a national outbreak. Since June of that year, protests began in the municipality of Nuevitas, in Camagüey, which configured a wave of 68 events, and about 70 in October and November, after the damage caused by Hurricane Ian. In 2023 there were less, but in 2024 they increased again, and in March a “mini outbreak” took place in east of Cuba. There are also mothers who protest, people who close a street because there is no water or electricity. They have continued producing protests, until the last one, the reaction for the tariff of the telecommunications company (Etecsa), which is a very important protest. What happens is that the grievance has not been resolved. There are exemplary judgments and people are afraid. If they were not afraid, they would be on the street all day, because the conditions in which they are living are very serious. But the disgust and discomfort that was in July 2021 has been increasing, along with the deepening of the crisis.

After July 11, the economy has gone worse. The situation of the electrical system, of water, garbage, health … is a crisis that covers all the services and basic needs of people. But if before the protest option was not in what I call the “horizon of possible actions” of people, after July 11 the protest became part of the repertoire, at least as a possibility. It is not something organized, there is no group that can convene and mobilize that disgust, but people are annoying and protest spontaneously. For its part, the government also knows that it now has to face a society that no longer endures everything.

P. And that was seen, as he said, in the reaction to the surrounding price increase. How significant is that protest has occurred within the Cuban University?

R. It is the most important protest that has been after July 11. It is a protest that occurs in the spaces controlled by power. It does not occur in the margins or outside the channels of the official world, or in what we call autonomy areas, but in the system structures themselves, within an organization that has representation in the State Council. He did not take people to the street, but contentious actions are not just actions where people are on the street. What is very interesting is that there were communications and university assemblies, within the university, which protested against a government measure. And that protest, discursively, is relevant. The students said they were not talking only for them, that they did not want privileges, but that they spoke for the people of Cuba. They even convened a student strike and requested the resignation of the president of the University Student Federation (FEU). That is protesting. None of these protests have satisfied its demands, but its success is not there, but that the protest itself becomes one of the possible actions in the face of disgust.

P. Demographers mark the year 2021 as the date on which the greatest exodus in recent Cuban history begins, the same year of the July 11 protest. Was it a government strategy?

R. In the Cuban imaginary leaving has always been a constant. And the government, before a crisis of legitimacy or a visible fracture of consensus, always seeks way to open migration. That happened in 1965, when Camarioca’s exodus; In 1980, when Mariel, and in 1994, with the crisis of the Balseros. Two months after July 11, the Cuban government signed an agreement with Nicaragua of visas exemption, and opened that door. It was a strategy. The interesting thing is that, despite being the greatest exodus, although the protests of intellectuals have lowered (some of whom have left), popular protests have increased. There is no leadership, people are summoned alone.

P. Will we have to wait almost 30 years for the Cuban to massively return to all the streets of the country?

R. Spontaneous protests such as July 11 are very difficult to predict. The government learned and exercises selective and preventive repression. There is greater police surveillance, there is repression, there are exemplary judgments. But I think people are less afraid now than before July 11, because they have less and less to lose. Cuban society is not the same, it is a society that has changed in many ways, especially in the way it relates to its rulers, who sees as public servants, people who have a responsibility, and people demand them.