Cuba Libre

[the blue panther]

Have you ever been?

Yes, twice, and I've always thought that they need a revolution to set them free from the previous one. Once to the north and once to the south.
Havana is a f'kin shithole, imho. That was 10 years ago. God knows how much more it will have crumbled since.

 

[johnnytapia]

You need to learn about Communism.

You also need to learn about why Cuba struggles economically

You also need to learn why the USA was trying to provide internet access, clue- it wasnt so the people could watch X Hamster

You also need to learn abut the latest raft of US sanctions

You also need to learn about US imperialism in Venezuela, why Mexico support Cuba, why Cuba support Venezuela, the role of the CIA in causing South American instability including installing fascist Pinochet to power in Chile.

Learn why Biden imposed sanctions

On July 11, Cubans took to the streets to express their dismay. It seemed like a spontaneous action, but on closer inspection there’s a bigger picture here. For 60 years the US has been trying to bring about regime change. In recent years, they have been using social media and mainstream media in a sophisticated way to do so. Recent events in Cuba are a textbook example of this.
The protests last Sunday July 11 were preceded by a fierce digital campaign. Renowned Spanish IT analyst Julian Macias Tovar has meticulously researched and mapped it out. His findings are shocking.

In the days before the protests, the hashtag #SOSCuba began to circulate strongly in Florida. The SOS Cuba campaign had already been launched on June 15 in New York, with the aim of influencing the vote in the United Nations General Assembly against the US blockade against Cuba. Without success. 184 countries condemned the blockade, which has been strangling Cuba for more than six decades. Only Israel and the US voted against.

The worsening Covid situation in Cuba in recent weeks provided an excellent opportunity to revive the campaign. On July 5th, Florida-based media platform SOS Cuba launched a Twitterstorm for humanitarian intervention in Cuba.

That happened under the guidance of Agustin Antonelli. This Argentinian is a member of the right-wing foundation Fundacion Libertad. This was not his first campaign. He had previously launched social media campaigns against Evo Morales in Bolivia and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico.

The first account that used #SOSCuba in relation to the Covid situation in Cuba was based in Spain. On both July 10 and 11, it sent more than a thousand tweets, with an automatic rate of 5 retweets per second. This is done by so-called bots.

Some of the robots used in this campaign are state of the art, expensive and very difficult to detect. We should not forget that the US has recently created a special command for war in cyberspace.

In his research Tovar points out that tweets were sent to artists in Cuba and in Miami to participate with #SOSCuba: protest for the deaths caused by Covid and the lack of medical resources. More than 1,100 responses were received to this tweet.

Remarkably, almost all of those are from accounts that were created recently or no longer ago than one year. More than 1,500 accounts were created between July 10 and 11. The operation made intensive use of robots, algorithms and accounts newly created for the occasion.

With hundreds of thousands of tweets and the participation of many artist accounts, the hashtag became trending in several countries on Sunday July 11. All that was needed were a few hundred Cubans to take to the streets.

The first demonstration in the town of San Antonio de Los Banos, 16 miles from Havana, was immediately publicised in the US by Yusnaby’s account with thousands of retweets. Yusnaby (US Navy) is a typical example of an automated fake account.

All this suggests that there has been a campaign to attack the Cuban government and blame it for the hardships facing the Cuban people.

The messages sent out into the world are full of fake news. One post, retweeted hundreds of times, shows a ten-thousand-strong crowd allegedly marching along the Malecon, Havana’s grand seaside boulevard. Reuters photo checkers found that it is actually a photo — in weak resolution — of a mass demonstration in Alexandria, Egypt, from February 2011. Zoomed in fragments show Egyptian flags.

Another piece of false information sent out into the world is the photo of protesters at the statue of Maximo Gomez in Havana. These were not counter-protesters but supporters of the Cuban revolution. Loads of media outlets and major newspapers like the New York Times and The Grauniad spread this piece of fake news. Reversing reality is a trick that has been used several times in the past on other occasions, including in Venezuela.


You are atypical of a person who swallows right wing propaganda for breakfast dinner and tea. Cuba is an example that American capitalists would rather not have on their doorstep so everything is done to discredit them, to harm them and to stop them having a place in the world.

Do you think the Cubans should be allowed to vote for parties other than the Communists, the only party legally allowed under the Cuban constitution? You don’t think the “people” would vote otherwise surely, given the roaring success of Castro?

 

[Rascal]

Do you think the Cubans should be allowed to vote for parties other than the Communists, the only party legally allowed under the Cuban constitution? You don’t think the “people” would vote otherwise surely, given the roaring success of Castro?

Yes they should be able to vote, Communism should be democratic right down to the grass roots.

We should not be telling them that though, enforcing liberal democracy on to countries rarely ends well. See Afghanistan, Iraq.

You assume though people are unhappy under the current regime because that is what the capitalist propaganda tells you to think. Is it not just as bad that a country tries to enforce regime change through sanctions and misrepresentation, that is also dictatorial.

 

[Bluemanc100]

Ran out of tomatoes!!!! No dig at you Bluemanc but it sums up the whole Cuban shambles. Their government can claim to give out as many free dental bridges as they want, but the reality is thus: no tomatoes. Maybe it’s not sunny enough.

They take what they can get (the tomatoes only an example) and make do… They’re certainly a stoic nation

 

[BigOscar]

Grass is always greener. Cuba will be a poverty striken shit hole no matter who is in charge, just as all the islands that are between the US and South America are. Getting rid of the current regime would at least get a bunch of US sanctions off their backs, but would probably lead yo a shit ton more drug trafficking problems.

 

[Mr Kobayashi]

They take what they can get (the tomatoes only an example) and make do… They’re certainly a stoic nation

They import the majority of their food (60 to 80% in a 2017 article in the Guardian), which makes a trade embargo particularly unreasonable when they are reliant on international markets to sell the surplus of food products they are able to produce.

 

[bluethrunthru]

Ran out of tomatoes!!!! No dig at you Bluemanc but it sums up the whole Cuban shambles. Their government can claim to give out as many free dental bridges as they want, but the reality is thus: no tomatoes. Maybe it’s not sunny enough.

Thankfully there are no fresh food shortages in post Brexit Britain eh?.......oh hang on......

 

[stonerblue]

Grass is always greener. Cuba will be a poverty striken shit hole no matter who is in charge, just as all the islands that are between the US and South America are. Getting rid of the current regime would at least get a bunch of US sanctions off their backs, but would probably lead yo a shit ton more drug trafficking problems.

Bermuda?

 

[BigOscar]

Bermuda?

It's not really between South America and the us, unless you are a particularly drunk people/drug smuggler. Not even certain it's actually a country either?

 

[stonerblue]

It's not really between South America and the us, unless you are a particularly drunk people/drug smuggler. Not even certain it's actually a country either?

I'll try Kitts and Nevis then.