HAVANA, (Reuters) – An impressive image is circulating this week on social media in Cuba: dissidents pumping his fist in the air, handcuffs hanging from one wrist, after friends and neighbors helped him evade police arrest in Havana.
The image is a screenshot of a video showing rapper Maykel Castillo celebrating his escape, surrounded by other dissidents and residents of Havana’s deteriorated San Isidro neighborhood on Sunday. Some join him in singing an anti-government song and insulting President Miguel Diaz-Canel.
Castillo told Reuters by phone from his home that the arrest attempt was another in a series of arbitrary holdings to intimidate him and others in the collection of the dissident artists, the San Isidro Movement (MSI) of Havana.
When asked about Sunday’s incident, the Foreign Ministry’s International Press Center, which includes all requests from foreign journalists for comment from state entities, told Reuters there would be no comment.
In the past five months, state media such as the Communist Party newspaper Granma have called Castillo and the MSI part of a US-led “soft coup” attempt, which they deny. The government generally denies dissent as members of small groups paid by the United States to instigate unrest and promote its decades-old efforts to overthrow the government.
For those wanting the end of the one-party state, Castillo, 37 and also known by his stage name Maykel Osorbo, is a hero. For others it is social misconduct.
The image circulated on social media shows that while public dissent in Cuba is still uncommon, it is becoming less so. This is partly due to mobile internet access and because frustrations with the government are growing in the midst of the island’s worst economic crisis in decades, said half a dozen Western analysts and diplomats interviewed by Reuters.
Tough US sanctions and the pandemic, which has gutted tourism, have cut foreign exchange earnings and largely beat the state-run economy, which contracted 11% in 2020. There has been a fundamental shortage as medicine and food.
The MSI has staged provocative performances and exhibitions documented online since it was created three years ago, first mainly for censorship but now also on daily hardship.
The “artivist” movement has expanded organized public disagreement beyond traditional political activism, attracting support from sectors of the wider artistic community and some ordinary citizens. There are no independent opinion polls so it is not possible to say how widespread this support is.
Speaking at the MSI headquarters, a dilapidated 1920s building, one of its main organizers, Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara, 33, told Reuters that 80-90% of its funding came directly from the artists themselves, by selling artwork or crowd funding.
The MSI’s latest performance, which included giving children candies, aimed to highlight the fact that families in impoverished neighborhoods like them couldn’t even afford sweets because of the state’s economic mismanagement, he said.
Otero Alcantara said the fact that ordinary citizens sided with the MSI against the police and joined in Sunday’s protest shows that they are beginning to overcome their fear of authority and the consequences of voice-overs, he said.
“This neighborhood is an example of what’s happening all over Cuba, not just here,” said Otero Alcantara. “Just like artists, we’re more visible.”
SPREADING FRUSTRATIONS
Small protests – whether over censorship, red tape deemed excessive or animal rights – have popped up all over the country in recent years.
Analysts say the launch of mobile internet in 2018 is a game changer because it allows Cubans to access information outside traditional state-controlled mass media, and mobile.
“This allows the frustration and disagreement of one person or community to spread in real time so that others who overcome similar frustrations will also learn that they are not alone and lose their fear of speaking out,” he said Ted Henken at Baruch College in New York, author of “Cuba’s Digital Revolution”.
Internet access has allowed the emergence of new stateless online media outlets and also allowed Cuban activists on the island to better connect with the emerging Cuban American diaspora after Fidel Castro’s left revolution in 1959.
The anti-government song “Patria y Vida” (“Homeland and Life”) popularized by residents of San Isidro on Sunday was a huge hit released in February by some of Cuba’s most popular contemporary musicians now living in Miami, as the reggaaeton duo Gente de Zona. The song also featured Castillo and another dissident rapper on the island.
The dissident group of the Cuba Patriotic Union, which has its headquarters in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba, says dozens of its activists have been on hunger strike for three weeks, protesting what it says is harassment by the a state that has prevented them from delivering food and medicines to needy residents. The group posts photos on the hunger strikers’ social media.
Reuters was unable to independently verify the strike.
The state media has dismissed it as a “show”.
On Thursday, Julie Chung, acting assistant secretary of the US State Department for Western Hemisphere Affairs, said on Twitter that Washington was alarmed by the “worsening situation” surrounding the hunger strike.
‘OLD PLAY’
The Cuba government has addressed some specific issues raised by disagreement, for example announcing in February that it was issuing a decree on animal rights.
He has attacked critics who want a complete political overhaul, such as the MSI and the independent journalists dealing with public disagreement. State television has devoted hours of prime time in recent months to dismissing it as “the new actors of the old playbook” – a US soft coup attempt.
The U.S. State Department refused to directly address Reuters’ question about Havana’s view that Washington and US groups were funding dissent in an attempt to destabilize it.
“We support those in civil society, in Cuba and around the world, who defend their rights or fight for freedom,” said a State Department spokesman.
Some independent activists and journalists have publicly stated that they are not US-directed, although they acknowledge receiving foreign grants including from US institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy, which is funded to largely by the US Congress.
Disagreements as MSI members have repeatedly documented house arrests on social media and other forms of harassment. At least 10 prominent non-state media journalists have left Cuba in recent years after complaining about state pressure, according to an informal account by Reuters.
Still, some dissenters told Reuters they were unquestionable.
“As much as they try to discredit the work we do, it doesn’t work,” said Castillo. “I am not anyone’s agent. I am a free citizen. I have family in the United States and friends and supporters who help me, and my artwork. “