On July 11, 2021, Cubans took to the streets in the largest protests the island had seen since 1959. The demonstrations began in the small town of San Antonio de los Banos, west of Havana, where residents gathered to protest shortages of food and medicine, long power cuts, and the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Within hours, the protests had spread across the country, to Havana and to dozens of towns and cities, carried by mobile phone video and by social media. The images were striking: ordinary Cubans, many of them young, marching in the streets, chanting for freedom and for food, and waving the American flag alongside the Cuban flag. For a government that had blamed the United States for Cuba’s problems for more than sixty years, the sight of its own people holding up the American flag as a symbol of liberty was a powerful rebuke.
How the Protests Began and Spread
The protests grew out of years of hardship, and the pandemic had made that hardship worse. Cuba was suffering severe shortages of food, medicine, and basic goods, and its economy, already weakened by the loss of support from Venezuela and by the tightening of American sanctions, was in deep crisis. Hospitals were short of supplies, pharmacies were empty, and families queued for hours for bread and cooking oil. At the same time, Cubans had more access to the internet than ever before, through mobile data, and they could see how people lived elsewhere, and they could share their own frustrations in real time. When residents of San Antonio de los Banos gathered on the morning of July 11, they livestreamed what was happening, and others, watching from Havana and from other towns, decided to join them.
The demands of the protesters were both practical and political. They wanted food and medicine, and they wanted an end to the power cuts that left them without light and without refrigeration. They also wanted freedom: freedom to speak, to protest, to travel, and to choose their own government. The slogans they chanted mixed the two, and that mixture was important. The protests were not led by a single party or by a single organization. They were spontaneous, driven by people who had had enough, and they were carried forward by networks of friends, families, and neighbours, responding to one another’s posts and videos. That spontaneity made the protests powerful, and it also made them difficult for the government to control, because there was no leader to arrest, no office to close, and no single demand to negotiate.
The Order of Combat and the Crackdown
The government’s response was swift and harsh. President Miguel Diaz-Canel, who had taken over from Raul Castro in 2018 and 2021, appeared on television and called on supporters of the revolution to take to the streets, in what he described as an order of combat. Police and security forces moved against the protesters, internet service was restricted, and hundreds of people were detained, by some counts more than a thousand. In the days that followed, many of those detained were tried in summary proceedings and sentenced to prison, some for years, for charges that included public disorder and contempt. The government blamed the protests on the United States, arguing that they had been organised and funded from abroad, and it presented itself as defending the revolution against a foreign plot.
The crackdown succeeded in clearing the streets, but it did not resolve the problems that had caused the protests. Food and medicine remained scarce, the economy remained in crisis, and the fear that had kept Cubans from protesting in public was now mixed with anger. Many Cubans, including people who had once supported the revolution, saw the arrests and the trials as confirmation that the government would not tolerate dissent, even when that dissent was driven by hunger and by a lack of medicine. Others, who remained loyal to the government, saw the protests as a threat to the stability of the country, and as a product of American hostility. The division that the protests revealed, between a government that insisted on unity and a people who wanted change, has not gone away.
What the Video Contributes
The video at the centre of this chapter captures the moment of the protests as it was seen by those who were there, and by those who watched it unfold online. It shows the flags, the chants, and the crowds, and it shows the response: the police, the arrests, and the government officials who called the demonstrators counter-revolutionaries. The American flag, in the hands of Cuban protesters, is the image that gives the video its power. For decades, the Cuban government had presented the United States as the enemy, and the Cuban flag as the symbol of the revolution. The protesters took both symbols and turned them around: the Cuban flag, for the country they loved, and the American flag, for the freedom they wanted. The image was not a foreign intrusion. It was a choice made by Cubans themselves.
July 11, 2021, did not overthrow the Cuban government, and it did not solve Cuba’s problems. But it changed something important. It showed that fear, which had kept public protest rare for more than sixty years, could be broken, even if only for a day. It showed that Cubans, connected by mobile phones and by social media, could organise without a leader, and that their grievances were shared by people across the island. And it showed the world a Cuba that the government had tried to keep hidden: a Cuba of empty shops, of long queues, of young people who wanted a future their country could not provide. The protests were a moment, but the conditions that caused them remain, and they will shape whatever happens next in Cuba.