Archipelago: the online activists spearheading Cuba protests

The US has condemned what Secretary of State Antony Blinken described as “intimidation tactics” by the Cuban government in sending military forces to surround activists’ homes to quash a planned march.

In a test of “the strength of the protest movement that erupted last summer”, said The Washington Post , the Cuban authorities “moved aggressively to derail another massive protest” by young activists with alleged links to “subversive organisations” financed by the US government.

The best-known organiser of Monday’s thwarted march is playwright Yunior Garcia, who “shot to fame last year” as “the face” of Archipelago, a “largely online opposition group”, said The Guardian. He had vowed to “march in silence” alone through Havana on Sunday carrying a white rose in a show of solidarity with Cubans prevented from protesting the following day.

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But “hours before he set out, plainclothes police swarmed his block and besieged his building”, said The Washington Post. And after Garcia “tried to signal to journalists” from inside his apartment, giant Cuban flags were draped “over the side of the building to cover the windows”.

Online activists

Garcia “was among the founders of Archipielago, a Facebook group of about 35,000 members that promotes discussion and debate”, said The New York Times (NYT).

According to Al Jazeera, the group was “urging Cubans to take to the streets on Monday to protest against the government”.

But following the crackdown on the march organisers, the call “went unheeded”, said The Independent. At the starting point set for the rally in capital Havana, “nobody showed up, and the city’s streets appeared calm”, the news site reported.

Garcia has claimed that his “internet and phone services are routinely cut”, said the NYT, and that “he recently found a decapitated chicken outside his front door, a religious hex, which he saw as a political threat”. Cuba’s state security is even alleged to have “visited his mother-in-law three times at work”.

“They have used every tool at their disposal to intimidate us,” the playwright told the paper. But “we have to shake things up so that people with dignity that make up society decide to change things”, he said.

Protests rocked the communist-run country in July, in the biggest outpouring of anger against the island’s government in decades.

Demonstrators chanting “down with the dictatorship” massed in cities across the country. Some of the protesters were detained or beaten on the streets by security forces, in scenes shared on social media.

One person was killed, dozens injured, and around 1,175 arrested during the unrest. According to human rights group Cubalex, about half of those arrested – many of whom have faced no trial – remain behind bars.

Other rights observers also “say the government has continued to stifle dissent” since the summer crackdown, Al Jazeera reported. In August, the regime unveiled new laws banning online content that attacks “the constitutional, social and economic” rules of the state or that incite actions “that alter public order”.

In the run-up to this week’s planned day of action – which was scheduled to coincide with the island reopening to tourists following months of lockdown measures – Archipelago reported that “its moderator, Daniela Rojo, had vanished”, said The Washington Post.

Security forces were also alleged to have detained another of the group’s leaders, Carlos Ernesto Diaz Gonzalez, in the southern city of Cienfuegos.

‘Maximum pressure’

In a statement on Sunday, US Secretary of State Blinken called on Cuba’s government to “respect Cubans’ rights, by allowing them to peacefully assemble and use their voices without fear of government reprisal or violence, and by keeping Internet and telecommunication lines open”.

The authorities in Havana claim the US government is “provoking instability by backing the demonstrations – a charge Washington denies”, The Washington Post reported.

The Cuban state has “publicly criticised” Garcia too, “saying that workshops he attended abroad, such as one that was about how dissidents could forge alliances with the Cuban military, amounted to planning a popular uprising”, the NYT said.

He has also admitted “meeting with American officials in Havana, but said he went to record a podcast” and to “discuss the effects” of the long-standing trade embargo on Cuba, the paper added.

These “supercharged US sanctions”, combined with the “pandemic, a surge in social media use and a younger generation hungry for change”, have “left the Communist Party reeling”, The Guardian said.

Joe Biden’s administration has maintained the Donald Trump-era policy of “maximum pressure” on Cuba, “which since 2017 has hammered the island with more than 200 sanctions aimed at choking hard currency inflows”, the paper continued.

The result is “an economic crisis that rivals the so-called Special Period, after the collapse of the Soviet Union”.

What has changed since the 1980s is the rise of “artists and young people who feel little connection to Fidel Castro’s 1959 Revolution”, The Washington Post said. This new generation of activists “have organised on social media, taking advantage of citizens’ increased access to the internet in recent years”.

And they pose a “a new and unpredictable challenge” to the Communist government’s “legitimacy”, the paper added.

“I believe in a diverse country and I think we have to completely do away with the one-party system which limits too many individual rights,” Garcia told The Guardian. “History is full of people who have gone to prison for struggling for their rights.”