Cuba's dictatorship is doing its thing, more restrictions on freedom

Nothing else was to be expected. The unexpected and surprising demonstrations all over Cuba chanting "Freedom", "Homeland or Life" or "Down with the dictatorship" have only alerted the communist gerontocracy that rules the island that its power could falter. For President Díaz Canel, his overseer Raúl Castro, and the rest of the ruling "nomenklatura", the protests were nothing more than counter-revolutionary attempts by a tiny minority to undermine their "paradise", egged on by anti-Castro cores in the United States.

Far from listening to calls for more freedom and democracy, the Cuban regime has reverted to what it does best: repression and restrictions. Hundreds of arrests of protesters and dissidents have yet to be cleared up, not to mention the mysterious cascading deaths of no less than six Cuban army generals, and the regime has published its first law on cyber-security. It establishes up to 17 "incidents", a mild way of listing crimes that the regime considers to be of medium to very serious danger, all of them punishable by the varying degrees of imprisonment already provided for in Cuba's harsh Penal Code.

As is usual in any self-respecting dictatorship, for Havana's leaders the most serious crimes are "the dissemination of false news, offensive messages, defamatory messages and those that have an impact on the prestige of the country". Cuban law does not go into detail on what each of these offences consists of. It therefore goes without saying that false news, defamatory messages or discrediting the country will be whatever its communist leaders want, whether it is to spread the famine and lack of horizons suffered by the vast majority of the population, the confiscation of most of the salary that Cuban health workers or educators on mission abroad should receive, or the corruption that is rampant among leaders and institutions that enjoy a certain amount of power.

The only thing the regime seems to have learned from the protests of 11 July is that the population's access to the internet means that people have many more sources of information than the regime's official ones. Arriving in Cuba in 2018, the mobile internet has caused the networks to swell with stories from Cubans who would demonstrate to their own compatriots the information asphyxiation to which the regime has been subjecting them for 63 years, and, in short, having kept them in a permanent lie for four generations.

It is ironic that for a regime that bases one of the pillars of its legitimacy to prolong itself indefinitely on the "blockade" to which it is supposedly subjected by the United States, it in turn blocks all attempts at freedom of expression by the Cuban people. In fact, the enactment of this new cybersecurity law coincides, moreover, with Havana's condemnation of the US Senate for "aggression", when the House of Representatives adopted an amendment that obliges President Joe Biden to use all of the country's technological capabilities to provide Cubans with unrestricted access to the internet, circumventing the regime's censorship.

The measure also coincides with a new imprisonment of the leader of the Cuban Patriotic Union (Unpacu), José Daniel Ferrer. The dissident and opposition leader was under house arrest, so he was unable to take an active part in any of the demonstrations in more than 40 Cuban towns on 11 July. This has not prevented the regime from charging him with "public disorder" and imposing a new four-year prison sentence. The Cuban Communist Party (PCC) fears the growing prominence of Ferrer, who has allowed himself to create a political party, the People's Party, in opposition to the only one allowed, the Communist Party, and to be elected among dissidents as leader of the so-called Council for Democratic Transition in Cuba.

As has become tiresomely habitual, every move by the Cuban regime that offers a glimpse of an opening or evolution is followed almost immediately by a new turn of the screw on freedoms and a toughening of the treatment of dissidents or opposition activists. This behaviour could also be interpreted in a different way: the naïve who, inside or outside the island, harbour any glimmer of confidence that the regime will eventually open up, contradicting the historical experience that no dictatorship of the so-called leftists has ever fallen peacefully, should lose all hope.