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On March 17, the Cuban population took to the streets to demonstrate their discomfort and, as happened in the protests of July 11, 2021, social networks in Cuba also became a stage for denunciation.
Tags such as #CubaEstadoFallido and #AbajoLaDictadura gathered protest messages from civil society facing one of the periods of greatest economic crisis ever recorded on the island.
The crisis behind the protest
Cuba is hungry. The lack of food and the electricity crisis are the main reasons for the island’s citizens to come out to demonstrate. However, the spark that ignited the discontent was the declarations of the Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, who on March 16 admitted that the blackout situation in Cuba will continue to be “tense”.
After these declarations, from the eastern province, the people of Santiago went out to protest on the Morro Highway and in the Agüero, La Barca de Oro and El Salado districts.
According to videos published on social networks, at least four other cities in the east of the country, such as El Cobre, in Santiago de Cuba; Bayamo, Granma, and in Cárdenas, Matanzas, would also join the protests. All this while the United States urged the regime to respect the human rights of the protesters.
The protest in networks
During the last few weeks, Cuba’s online socio-political conversation has revolved around the protests. An analysis by ProBox Digital Observatory showed the positioning of two Twitter tags (former X) linked to the topic: #CubaEstadoFallido, positioned with about 1,733 tweets on March 11, and #AbajoLaDictadura, positioned on March 12 with about 1,113 tweets. The level of authenticity around the two tags exceeded 90% of the messages.
International support for the protest was also evidenced by the hashtag #CubaPaLaCalle with more than 131,000 tweets and whose authenticity level was around 93.3% according to a sample of 1,000 tweets.
A deeper search on the conversation in Cuba, through keywords such as #CubaEstadoFallido, #CubaPaLaCalle, #AbajoLaDictadura, protestas Cuba, escasez Cuba, apagones en Cuba, corriente comida patria y vida registered an extremely marked peak in the conversation during March 18 with 2,352 mentions.
In addition, it was found that the social network most used to protest on the island was Facebook with 42.44% of mentions, followed by X with 38.26% of the mentions and then Instagram with 19.30% of the mentions registered.
Within the conversation around the protest, words and tags such as #CubanosPorElMundo (with 510 mentions) stood out. The main country from which it was possible to obtain geolocation of the participants in the conversation was the United States, from where 1,993 mentions came from, followed by Cuba with 1,016 mentions.
Also stand out words such as #DíazCanelSingao (with 503 mentions), #CubanosEnMiami #CubanosEnTampa (with 438 mentions), quitan internet (with 336 mentions), comunistas cobardes (with 335 mentions), pongan internet (with 335 mentions), ah cagados (with 335 mentions), among many others that are reflected in the following word cloud.
This is how the regime responded to the protest
Repress, deny and blame the empire is the formula repeated by the Diaz Canel regime. At least five people were detained in the March 17 anti-government protests, according to a report by the legal information center Cubalex.
“After the protests on March 17, violent arrests were reported in order to repress the demonstrators. Also, there have been reports of people in forced disappearance,” said the organization, which was able to confirm the arrests and identities of the five protesters.
In addition, the organization denounced military presence and deployment of police operations in several cities of the country, including Guantánamo, Camagüey, Cienfuegos, Artemisa and Pinar del Río, in addition to Bayamo and Santiago de Cuba, scenes of demonstrations.
But the repression was not only physical, the online protest was also sought to silence the protest. In the areas of the protests, Internet outages were recorded. In addition, Cubalex collaborators confirmed the loss of communication for several hours in the provinces of Guantanamo, Holguin, Granma, Santiago de Cuba and Ciego de Avila.
In addition, on March 18, the regime promoted the hashtags #UnidosXCuba with approximately 1,000 tweets and #BloqueoGenocida, with a record of approximately 7,396 tweets. Most of the conversation driven by the regime in the midst of the protests took place through X (82.99%), followed by far by Instagram (9%) and Facebook (8%).
On Monday, March 19, President Miguel Díaz-Canel said that his government was willing to “maintain a peaceful dialogue with the Cuban population and continue seeking solutions to the difficult situation the island is going through”, although he did not fail to blame the external “enemy” and what he described as “a policy of economic asphyxiation and media intoxication encouraged from South Florida and with the complicity of the White House”.
Once again, citizen protest found in social networks one of the few spaces that the regime cannot completely control and that will be there to reflect what is happening in the streets of a country with serious economic and social problems.
For more information on socio-political manipulation in networks you can follow us on social networks as @ProBoxVe
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