Fabiola Santiago
Cuba criminalizes criticizing regime on social media, thinking it will hide people’s discontent. It won’t | Opinion
The Cuban regime is a 21st century abomination.
In the middle of a deadly pandemic — with hospitals and clinics understaffed and lacking basic, life-saving equipment like oxygen, and people dying in ruinous conditions — Cuban leaders have decided the solution is to crank up the repression.
In the midst of suffering, when people need the unrestricted flow of information to survive, the only thing the government of Miguel Díaz-Canel has to offer is a wholesale attack on free speech and internet communications.
Cowards!
They’re afraid of an unarmed people who staged historic protests across the island on July 11 and whose only weapon is the truth.
New internet censorship laws
The goal is to silence, at any price, not only dissent, but also the state of social upheaval in Cuba.
On Tuesday, the Ministry of Communications instituted broad legislation, Resolution 150, making the expression of views on social media deemed unacceptable to the government a crime.
People who use the internet to oppose the regime will be prosecuted as “cyberterrorists,” the law says.
Another decree, No. 35, bans Cubans from using the internet or any other telecommunication service to “undermine” the government, transmit what the regime considers “false news,” offensive information or content that affects “collective security, general welfare, public morality and respect for public order.”
The decree also orders providers to monitor what people post and say and shut down services when they violate sweeping gag orders that leave what’s illegal up to the interpretation of notorious rights abusers, including the Armed Forces and the Interior Ministry.
Hiding a crumbling country
Surely, besides muzzling Cubans, the measures also are meant to preempt the Biden administration’s commitment to help Cubans stay connected after the regime shut down the internet and social-media sites as armed police and paramilitary forces sought to quash the protests.
But the Cuban government also doesn’t want the world to see that Cubans can’t even grieve their dead in peace.
They want to keep out of public view their despicable tactics, like the grieving woman crying and screaming at a funeral for a COVID-19 victim. Police forcefully shoved her into a police car and carted her off to jail.
Because screaming in frustration at the horrific circumstances they’re enduring, too, is a crime in despotic Cuba.
They don’t want the world to hear the moving pleas on Twitter of a young man in Holguin, Magdiel Jorge Castro, whose dead grandfather was still at home, 15 hours after dying of COVID, because there are no coffins in Cuba.
His grandfather, whom he describes as part of a generation that sacrificed everything for revolutionary ideals, had been turned away from the hospital because there was no oxygen, either.
“You can’t tell me it’s fake news,” Castro says, alluding to the new gag laws. “How much more abuse can we take?”
The patriarchal regime doesn’t want the world to see a group of young Cuban doctors — fearlessly identifying themselves and their place of work — speak in front of a camera, one by one, denouncing the COVID conditions under which they’re operating and the lack of support from the government.
The doctors could now face punishment, a travesty compounded, under the Resolution 150 provision that content can’t damage the country’s “reputation.”
But the prestige Cuba peddles to the world as a bastion of medical prowess is disintegrating through no other hand than the regime’s mismanagement. A country that boasts of its international medical brigades and oxygen manufacturing plants — Díaz-Canel was televised touring one this week to appease the public — can’t keep it in stock for its own people.
A land of tropical forests can’t make coffins. A land of fertile fields that exports food to other countries can’t feed its own people. They blame the U.S. embargo for their predicament when food and medicines are exempt, and President Biden has offered to send vaccines they’ve declined. And they berate Cuban Americans when they’re the ones keeping families afloat with remittances that amount to billions of dollars in aid a year.
Cuba, of course, calls inconvenient truths “fake news.”
So very Trumpian of them.
And the regime defends its criminalizing of content, condemned Thursday by the Committee to Protect Journalists, as “standard practice worldwide.” As they do with arbitrary arrests and summary trials without a proper defense, Cuba seeks to normalize the indefensible.
But this defiant generation knows better and isn’t going to let them get away with legislating rights away. Their answer to arbitrary arrests for the crime of expressing their discontent was to tell their stories on social media.
Their answer to the new gag laws was to take to Twitter — and protest them.
Bravísimos.
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