“Within the Revolution, everything.” 1 argued President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez (2021) on the 60th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s framing of his policies toward intellectuals, “means that the only topic that is not up for discussion is the Revolution. It is not a fact in dispute.” Díaz-Cannel echoed Castro’s 1961 remarks in order to defend the 2019 Constitution’s Article 4, “The socialist system that this Constitution establishes is irrevocable.” Less than two weeks later, on 11 July 2021, across the country several thousand Cubans participated in protests whose scope and interprovincial magnitude were unprecedented since the 1960s (and, in Havana, since 1994).
Díaz-Canel’s first public response indicated an extremely high level of concern for the capital-R Revolution: “There are many of us among our people, revolutionaries ready to sacrifice our lives … Those who may wish to confront the Revolution must climb over [our] corpses … Therefore, we are calling upon all revolutionaries in our country, and also all communists, to fill the streets …,” ready to fight (Ramos López and Nusa Peñalver 2021). The key accusation brought against those who were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned was ‘sedition’. The protestors shouted mainly about food, prices, and electric power blackouts, though some called for ‘regime change’. Those in office saw these protests as a serious threat to the rule of the government and the Communist Party. This article does not discuss the reasons for the protests but, instead, it sheds light on the responses of the government and the party.
Contrary to common perceptions that repression alone marked the response to the protests, Cuban officials responded through a combination of repression and change. They soon leavened the repression with supplementary liberalisation policies. These leaders, accustomed to taking pragmatic steps, share key ideologically defining goals and tools. Their broad goal has been a single-party system; national elections without interparty competition; a civil society mostly under the ‘leading role’ of the single party; the incorporation of military and state security leadership in party institutions; state ownership of television and radio stations, newspapers, and most publishing; and state ownership of most of the means of production, governed through central planning, bureaucratic coordination, and a leading role for state enterprises. A cohesive elite believes that socialism remains viable (for comparisons to other communist countries, see Kornai 1992: Chapter 15).
Prior to the outbreak of the July 2021 protests, Cuba’s economic situation had turned severe, for various reasons. Nevertheless, intra-elite conflict was highly muted, and nearly absent, while independent civil society organisations were weak. Following the outbreak of protests, the official coping tools featured repression, though more restrained in Cuba than in China at Tiananmen Square in 1989 or in Eastern Europe in the 1950s through the 1980s: the Cuban armed forces did not shoot at protestors. Other steps soon followed. Emigration was facilitated, limited but important economic liberalisation accelerated, mid-level important officials were dismissed providing some political accountability, and there were hints of political liberalisation. Within a year of the outbreak of the protests, the government and the Communist Party had prevailed.
In reaching that outcome, Cuba’s national leadership ascertained that repression alone did not suffice; they never limited their response as if it might have sufficed. The mixed-methods toolkit approach – repression with elements of change – served the government and the Communist Party best.
More specifically, what did Cuba’s leaders do after the July 2021 protests?
Affirmed the value of the Revolution – always with capital R – and its significant accomplishments over the decades in social policies, especially education and health care.
Blamed outside agitators based in Miami and other countries and pointed to the burdens on the Cuban people from decades of US economic sanctions: imperialism and “the US blockade.”
Repression, but soon reliant on ‘socialist legality’, applying some restraint.
Emigration facilitated, thereby exporting the discontented.
Political accountability: Worried retired elderly leaders resurfaced. Moreover, in just one year after the quinquennial Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba (Partido Comunista de Cuba – PCC), one-third of its first secretaries in the provinces were dismissed. Party membership fell.
Selective political and social liberalisation targeted appeals to the LGTBQI+ community and Afro-descendants. There was also some National Assembly and Supreme Court liberalisation.
Selective democratisation, submitting the draft Family Code for public discussion and a national referendum, permitting public opposition.
Limited economic liberalisation: implemented policies, first adopted in 2010–2011, that had remained unimplemented and partly reversed in 2015–2019. Micro-, small-, and medium-sized firms grew in number rapidly.
This article focuses on what was new in the response to the protests, not on circumstances that have long existed, for which there is ample scholarly literature. It limits the examination of responses approximately to the year that followed the protests. It considers responses that cascaded during the same time period and circumstances. At the end, there is a brief comparison to the more regional March 2024 protests.
The next sections of the article first examine repression, assessing its partial reliance on the law and courts to sustain it but also to mitigate it, and facilitate emigration. There follow examples of some political accountability, namely, the return of former senior leaders from retirement, the dismissal of several Communist Party First Secretaries in the provinces, and trends in the Party’s membership. Next, the text discusses examples of social and political liberalisation and the public debate prior to a referendum that authorised same-sex marriage. Finally, it looks at the political aspects of the economic policy changes whose adoption accelerated following the protests. The conclusion returns to the article’s major themes regarding the official response.
Repression
Military and repressive institutions differ worldwide, but Communist armies, with limited exceptions, have not attempted military coups. Only in Romania did they help to overthrow the government. Coup attempts failed in China in 1971 and the Soviet Union in 1991 (Bunce 2003; Barany 1997). Cuba’s leaders have not feared a coup; its Armed Forces and Interior Ministry troops and police have been loyal. Repressive actions in Cuba were not as severe as in Hungary in 1956 or in Czechoslovakia in 1968 (Ekiert 1996) or the order to shoot at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square (Heilmann 2017: 251–252).
However, for the first time this century, in 2021 the Cuban government charged hundreds of those arrested with sedition and sent them to prison. Arrests occurred on July 11, 2021, and immediately thereafter. Based on reports from activists and independent journalists, Human Rights Watch documented that most 11 July protests in 13 of Cuba’s 15 provinces had been peaceful. Nevertheless, state security arrested over a thousand people (Human Rights Watch 2021, 2022). Some were released within two or three days, consistent with past catch-and-release protest management.
The sources of evidence converge. In January 2022, the national prosecutor’s office (Fiscalía General de la República) reported that it had charged 790 people but only 710 faced criminal trials, of whom 490 were already in prison pending trial (Fiscalía 2022a). In February and March 2022, the Supreme Court reported that Holguin province’s highest court sentenced 20 protestors, charged with sedition, to deprivation of liberty (median sentence 13 years); that Havana province’s highest court similarly had found 128 of the 129 people guilty of sedition, sentencing them to deprivation of liberty (median sentence 15 years); and that a military tribunal had tried 12 defendants from the municipality of Cárdenas, Matanzas province, found them all guilty of sedition, and sentenced them to deprivation of liberty (median sentence ten years) (Tribunal 2022a, 2022b). There was cross-provincial consistency regarding the accusations and the sentences for sedition for 160 persons.
In late May 2022, a Havana Court judged and convicted two prominent leaders (and three others) from the Movimiento San Isidro, founded in 2018 and most active in the Fall of 2020: Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maikel Castillo Pérez. They had had stellar roles in the viral song “Patria y Vida”, a counter to the official slogan “Patria o Muerte”. that is, homeland and life versus homeland or death. The Court sentenced Otero to five years in prison for insulting the flag (defamation), contempt, and ‘disorderly’ public protest; he had claimed that his use of the flag on social media had been an artistic protest performance. The national prosecutor provided specific examples: Otero used the flag as a towel, a quilt to sleep on, a bedsheet, and a cover while sitting on the toilet. The Court sentenced Castillo to nine years in prison for similar charges but also for resisting arrest and defaming the nation’s highest officials on social media – digitally altering their images, offending their ‘honour and dignity’ (Fiscalía 2022e).
Most cases criminalised political expression and protest. Most protests and protestors had been peaceful, but officials highlighted rock throwing, breaking windows, and resisting arrest, alleging that the intent was to ‘subvert the constitutional order’, e.g., sedition. The online newspaper El Toque researched the allegations of violent attacks against hospitals and pharmacies but found only two such instances of violence across the country, targeting a pharmacy in Bejucal and a hospital in Cárdenas (DEFACTO 2022).
In short, most sentences were disproportionately severe, given the minor acts of violence and the peaceful behaviour of most protestors. The repression sought to dissuade and deter political opposition expression.
Lawful repression
Repression is more explainable to the public if clothed within the garbs of the rule of law. Cuba has built a socialist legality apparatus. Its 1976 Constitution and subsequent legislation codified authoritarian practices; the state retained wide discretion in its exercise of power. Following the suppression of opposition in the 1960s, socialist legality undertakings in the 1970s helped to stabilise rule-based governance, which facilitated the only period of sustained economic growth (1971–1984) since the 1959 Revolution. The enactment of the 1975 Family Code similarly codified and induced a range of social changes.
Socialist legality had its least rights-protecting impact regarding political opponents. The government characteristically had failed to report on the number of persons arrested or imprisoned, nor did it publicise the duration of their sentences. It denied holding political prisoners. However, in 2022 official behaviour changed. The chief prosecutor and the Supreme Court publicised information about the magnitude of official actions, alleging sedition and warranting imprisonment. The government’s reasons for its greater transparency were to counter what it described as misinformation and disinformation through social media; reassure citizens that it was neither capricious nor arbitrary but, instead, applied the Constitution and the law; and deter future protests. At the May 2022 National Assembly plenary session, President Díaz-Canel (2022c) claimed that the imprisoned protestors “had access to the procedural guarantees set under Cuban law”.
Socialist legality is Janus-faced. The laws authorise repressive acts, but law enforcement institutions displayed some restraint. The first face was apparent in the Spring of 2022 when the National Assembly approved a new Penal Code (Anteproyecto 2022). It defines the following punishable crimes with corresponding imprisonment: “provision of [official] information … to nongovernmental organizations [or] international institutions” (Articles 116.1 and 116.6), 10 to 30 years, or life, or death penalty; “arbitrary exercise of any right or freedom recognised by the Constitution” (Article 120.1), presumably leaving the definition of ‘arbitrary’ to the prosecutor and the court, four to ten years; nonviolent “disturbance of the constitutional order” (Article 121.b), 10 to 20 years; nonviolent “incitement against … the socialist State … through oral or written propaganda” (Article 124.1), two to five years and, if through social media, four to ten years (Article 124.2); “provision [or] receipt … of funds … to support activities against the State” (Article 143), four to ten years; “insult … or offense, by word or in writing … of a government official” (Article 185.1), six months to a year but, if against the president, ministers, deputies, or other high officials, one to three years (Article 185.1); “provocative … acts … that affect [public] order” (Article 263.1), six months to two years; expressing “public … disdain of government, political, or mass organizations” (Article 270), one to three years; “membership … in an unauthorised association” (Article 274.2), six months to a year. Law enforcement decisions remained highly discretionary.
Illustrating the law’s ‘other face’. breaking with past patterns, the Supreme Court showed restraint. Also in Spring 2022, 15 protestors from the La Güinera neighbourhood in Havana appealed the length of their sentences (up to 30 years, for sedition), which the Havana Province Court had imposed. The Supreme Court reduced the sentences by up to ten years in 13 cases. Other protestors, sentenced to shorter prison terms, successfully appealed, and also had their prison terms reduced. The national prosecutor’s office indicated that 21.5 per cent of the 488 people sentenced on the eve of the anniversary of the protests received sentences short of imprisonment. Thus, socialist legality reaffirmed the decisions to repress but also provided the first public examples of successful judicial review to benefit the accused (Nuevas 2022; Tribunal 2022c; Fiscalía 2022b, 2022c, 2022d). More broadly, between 2017 and 2021 the national prosecutor’s office had reversed one-sixth of the decisions that lower-level prosecutors had made, ruling instead in favour of the accused (Martínez Rodríguez and Antón Rodríguez 2022). The novelty in 2022 was to make this information continuously public.
Socialist legality affirms the state’s exercise of power, but its use of repression has become more modulated. It features lawful repression and restraint, along with greater prosecutorial and Supreme Court restraint (Fernández Estrada 2022). Reliance on socialist legality standardised practices across provinces and cases; it permitted reversals of some harsh repressive sentences, perhaps increasing respect for institutions.
Exporting the discontented
To deplete the discontented, facilitate emigration. At the start of the 1960s, the communist world split over emigration policies. The Soviet Union and East Germany (German Democratic Republic) built a wall across Berlin to prevent emigration. Cuba permitted emigration, at times facilitated it, and, in 1980, induced it (Domínguez 1992). The Cuban government acted in 1965, 1980, 1994–95, and again in 2021–22 to compel the US government to accept Cuban migrants.
In each instance, substantial domestic discontent presaged protests. In specific cases, the government persecuted, intimidated, and threatened its political opponents, pushing them to emigrate. Recent examples include the leadership of the once-thriving Cuba Posible, a self-described loyal-opposition movement; in the Fall of 2021 Archipiélago, as they prepared to organise new peaceful protests (Arrestos 2021); and in September 2022 the Jesuit Superior in Cuba, because he refused to stop the Jesuits from speaking out on human rights.
In November 2021, the Cuban government’s close ally, Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega, removed the visa requirement for Cubans to travel to Nicaragua. That enabled migrants to meet legal requirements to exit Cuba and enter Nicaragua and, once there, trek toward the US–Mexican land border. The number of undocumented Cubans encountering US border officials increased, following Nicaragua’s opening, from 14,136 in the US Fiscal Year (FY) 2019, to 39,303 in FY 2021, which ended on 30 September 2021, jumping to 224,607 in FY 2022 (US Department of Homeland Security 2019; US Customs and Border Protection 2023). These emigration numbers exceed the sum of those of the 1994 balsero and the 1980 Mariel boatlift crises. Many highly skilled people emigrated. Exporting the discontented, including those in the political opposition, remains in the Cuban government’s toolkit.
Political accountability
Some officials were held accountable for the 2021–2022 events. Formal mechanisms of accountability were never tested during Fidel and Raúl Castro’s leadership, nor since the outbreak of protests. Instead, informal means signalled the older leadership’s views.
In 2018, General Raúl Castro stepped down as President of Cuba. At the 2021 PCC Congress, he retired as the Party’s First Secretary and orchestrated the retirement of old-timers from the PCC Political Bureau and Central Committee. Officially called the ‘Historicals’. they participated in the 1950s rebellion and in founding the new government in the 1960s. By 2021, the youngest were above age 80. However, though formally replaced, they had not exited politics. The 2021–2022 troubles brought several back to the forefront of politics. The Historicals had not faced a public nationwide challenge since the mid-1960s; the most severe street protests had occurred only in the environs of the Port of Havana in the Summer of 1994.
Commander of the Revolution Ramiro Valdés had been the only Historical remaining in government after 2018 as Deputy Prime Minister, a post he held since 2009, although he had left the Central Committee and Political Bureau in 2021. Valdés began to frequent public events, photographed next to President Díaz-Canel, speaking with authority about energy and infrastructure problems amidst electric power blackouts in 2022. José Ramón Machado, longtime PCC Organization Secretary whose entire Secretariat team was defenestrated at the 2021 PCC Congress, reappeared photographed at the head table at party meetings held in the provinces, where provincial first secretaries lost their jobs. General Raúl Castro also showed up at symbolic events, but to support Díaz-Canel, whereas the presence of Valdés and Machado tended to undercut the president. Sharing the stage with Díaz-Canel, on television Valdés seized the spotlight from the president; reemerging from retirement, Machado’s presence signalled that Díaz-Canel alone did not suffice to make Communist Party leadership replacements.
At the April 2022 PCC Central Committee Plenum, Armed Forces First Vice Minister Army Corps General Ramón Espinosa rejoined the Central Committee and the Political Bureau, waiving the rule created only a year earlier at the Eighth Party Congress that prohibited Central Committee membership for anyone above age 60. Espinosa, 83 years old, had exited the Central Committee and the Political Bureau at that Congress (he died in 2024). Espinosa had served on the Political Bureau from 1997 to 2021, and in Cuba’s wars in Angola in 1975 and Ethiopia in 1979. He headed Cuba’s Eastern Army for 27 years, where he was the frontline officer facing the US base near Guantánamo, during the 1990s in charge of the confidence-building military steps between US and Cuban forces.
The visible role of these Historicals implied that the new national leaders could not yet govern alone, a pattern akin to China’s Deng Xiaoping’s persistent leadership role overseeing his successors, whom he deemed not yet up to the task of governing on their own.
The PCC first provincial secretaries: Dismissals and appointments
Cuba’s 2021 protests seemed to imply that lower-level officials had underperformed. The top political officials in each of the 15 provinces are the PCC first secretaries (governors handle administration). Díaz-Canel confirmed those first secretaries when he became national PCC First Secretary at the 2021 PCC Congress.
Following the July protests, from late October 2021 to early April 2022, eight of his chosen 15 provincial secretaries were replaced: one was promoted to the national Secretariat, two rotated to other provinces in the same role, and five were ousted. In the past, dismissals had occurred gradually between party congresses. From 2016 to 2021, seven first secretaries were ousted during the six years, in contrast to five first secretaries ousted just during the 12 months between 2021 and 2022. The five ousted in 2021–2022 had also been reappointed to the Central Committee during the 2021 PCC Congress.
Seven of the eight new first secretaries were already members of the Central Committee, and the PCC April 2022 Plenum promoted the eighth to the Central Committee. The new First Secretary careers highlight their longstanding importance. The new First Secretary in Santiago province had been serving on the national PCC Secretariat (to which he would return by 2024); in Matanzas province, the new First Secretary had led the national Communist Youth Union and had served as a Council of State member; and in Mayabeque province, the new one had previously headed the Communist Youth Union and served a five-year term on the Council of State. They already had influence.
The PCC membership: Comparative context
The 2019 Constitution’s Article 5 hails the PCC as the “organised vanguard of the Cuban nation” based on its “democratic character” and installs it as the country’s only authorised political party. Therefore, over the years the PCC has sought to grow its membership. It succeeded in the previous but not in this century.
At the time of the 1975 First Party Congress, there were 202,807 members. At the 1997 Fifth Congress, Fidel Castro (1997) reported that there were “about 780,000” members (7.1 per cent of the population), of whom 232,000 joined in the 1990s. Following the 2021 Eighth Congress, in December the membership was just 713,234, falling to 708,878 by the April 2022 Plenum, when 6.3 per cent of the nation’s people belonged to it (Tamayo León 2022a; Domínguez 1978: 321). In 2021, Vietnam’s Communist Party membership was 5.2 per cent of its population, and China’s was 6.7 per cent (Degenhardt 2021; Statista 2023).
All communist ruling parties are and have been small relative to the population. Membership declines were common following a crisis. Thus, the PCC’s small size is typical, as was its post-crisis membership decline. It is a self-disciplined vanguard party, with a small but selective membership, ready to rule, but whose members are far from a majority of the population.
One PCC weakness is harder to resolve. As Rafael Hernández (2022) wrote on the eve of the 2021 Congress, the Party’s ideological work is superficial and formalistic, underestimating its members’ educational level, with inflexible agendas compelled from the top, oblivious to the society’s diversity, obsessed with official commemorations of political anniversaries, and marked by rhetoric empty of content that offends and alienates its members. Its structure is bureaucratic and uncreative, altogether weakening its authority.
In conclusion, the national and provincial leadership may have been put on probation by the Historical leaders and the public, expecting greater accountability from the leaders of a small party.
Political liberalisation: Rights and the permitted opposition
Cuba’s leading officials did not cope with the unrest through repression alone. They also advanced a modest political liberalisation, protecting some rights and the expression of a limited opposition in 2021–2022.
The 2022 Penal Code, notwithstanding its several repressive articles, also incorporates protections of political rights. An official who prevents the exercise of freedom of expression or the press may be imprisoned for six months to two years (Article 384). Tampering with voter registration, voter turnout, access to the polls, the vote count, or committing electoral fraud is subject to six months to two years imprisonment (Article 431) (Anteproyecto 2022). The government constrains the exercise of such freedoms, preserves a single-party system, and mandates National Assembly elections that require the number of candidates to be equal to the number of seats. Thus, such guarantees may be more useful in the future.
During the debates preceding the enactment of the new Constitution in 2019, proposals had been made to create a state organ to protect constitutional rights, to no avail. Nevertheless, following the July 2021 protests, a new Supreme Court chamber (‘sala’) was authorised to protect constitutional rights. It opened in May 2022 (Tribunal 2022d).
In officially authorised spaces, the government also permitted some political opposition. At the May 2022 National Assembly session, Deputy Mariela Castro Espín, General Raúl Castro’s daughter, proposed that the new Penal Code should include ‘femicide’ as a crime. The Supreme Court president and the chair of the Assembly’s Constitutional Affairs Committee rebuffed her, claiming that the Code protected women sufficiently. Similarly, Deputy Maria Armenia Yi Reina spoke as a Christian believer to oppose the death penalty. The Supreme Court president argued that national security required it for 23 different causes, although it had not been applied for two decades (Antón Rodríguez and del Sol González 2022). Neither Castro Espín nor Yi Reina prevailed, but the official press reported their objections.
Consider other officially permitted modest political liberalisations following the July 11, 2021, protests. Many protestors were young or Afro-descendants. On July 15, the government at last established nationwide the provincial councils to apply its national programme against racism and racial discrimination, authorised in late 2019 but not yet implemented (De la Hoz 2021). And, assessing that the leader of its official youth organisation seemed inept facing protests by many young people, three weeks after the July 11 protests, the PCC dismissed the Communist Youth Union’s First Secretary, who had served for just 15 months, and dropped him from the Central Committee (Redacción Digital 2021).
Thirdly, although Mariela Castro’s proposal did not prevail at the May 2022 National Assembly, for the preceding decade she had lobbied effectively. At the PCC 2012 Conference, she succeeded in including ‘sexual orientation’ in the PCC’s nondiscrimination clause but failed to include ‘gender identity’. By 2022, her team helped to formulate the Families Code’s protection against gender-identity discrimination (Velázquez 2022). The PCC accepted such lobbying, notwithstanding its enduring hostility to semblances of factionalism (Ubieta Gómez 2021).
Fourth, on April 10, 2022, Cuba’s day to honour dogs, dozens of people committed to the prevention of cruelty to animals gathered at the entrance of Havana’s cemetery to march toward Jeannette Ryder’s tomb, a US citizen long resident of Cuba who had laboured to protect animals, plants, and children. State security prohibited the march from a public park in central Havana and visited its leaders to warn that they risked sedition charges. However, on the day of the march, officials relented: it could not take place on sidewalks or streets, but participants could proceed directly to the cemetery, which they did (Sosa Tabío 2022). This limited permit highlighted the possibilities and limits of nongovernmental action.
Lastly, following the post-hurricane September 2022 protests, the official publication Cubadebate justified the new wave of arrests, but it also kept open its online ‘comments’ section. Several posts challenged the government to authorise peaceful protests, as a guaranteed constitutional right. More posts defended the arrests, but this unusual public debate over internal security and the right to protest peacefully, taking place in an official venue, illustrates a new political liberalisation (Fiscalía 2022f).
In short, in the 15 months following the July 11 protests, the government and the PCC somewhat opened public spaces within official institutions to civil society – a political liberalisation. Repression was not the sole response.
Liberalisation versus democratisation?
The government’s handling of its new Families Code highlighted tensions between processes of liberalisation and democratisation. Following the public discussions before the approval of the 2019 Constitution, the government retreated from its intent to insert a constitutional article to authorise marriage between two persons to replace the old Constitution’s formulation that marriage was between a man and a woman. Instead, a new Family Code was to be subject to a referendum. The new Code defined marriage as being between two people (Article 197). It permits same-sex couples to adopt children and authorises assisted pregnancy through surrogacy and medical technology (Articles 50, 56, 115–131). The new Code appealed to the LGBTQI+ community and their allies, which officials had been cultivating since the start of the century, reversing their predecessors’ gay-repressive record from the 1960s through the 1980s.
From February to April 2022, the National Electoral Council convened 79,129 meetings; over six million people attended, and 336,595 people spoke. The Council reported 434,860 proposals, describing 61.96 per cent as favourable to the new draft Code, but only 39.96 per cent indicated unqualified support. Another 19.66 per cent expressed support conditioned upon changes in the draft, 12.06 per cent flatly opposed it, 1.62 per cent expressed doubts, and the remainder wished to add items to the draft, or the Council could not ascertain their approval or disapproval. The most discussed topics dealt with marriage, adoption, surrogacy, parental responsibility, and domestic violence (calculations from Díaz-Canel 2022b). That 38 per cent voiced doubts or opposition was unprecedented in a political system where unity and elite cohesion 2 have been core values.
Some opposition derived from traditional attitudes toward sex and gender. Several Evangelical churches and the Roman Catholic Bishops opposed the constitutional article and the Families Code. The Catholic Bishops’ pastoral letter claimed that the debate over the constitutional article demonstrated the public’s opposition to same-sex marriage; the bishops proposed retaining the 1975 Family Code heterosexual marriage requirement. They opposed what they called ‘gender ideology’, same-sex marriage, surrogacy, and adoption by same-sex couples. They worried that the new Code weakened parental authority over children. They fretted that “gender ideology” would become embedded in the school curriculum, reiterating their opposition to several Ministry of Education regulations (Comité 2022).
The respective assemblies of the Baptist Conventions for western and eastern Cuba voted to adopt statements. The Western Baptist Convention used clear but measured language to oppose same-sex marriage, personal affirmation of gender identity, fluid sexuality, surrogacy, and the sex education curriculum (Asociación 2022). The Eastern Baptist Convention used sharper language, with each of its seven statements opening with, “We do not accept under any circumstances …” They opposed same-sex marriage and, by name, Minister of Education Ena Elsa Velázquez’s Resolution 16/2021 that required curriculum changes to be inclusive across sexual orientations and gender identities (Iglesia 2021).
Socially illiberal religious leaders and voters were not the only ones to oppose the Code. Under Fidel Castro’s rule, in the 1960s homosexuals, among others, were sent to hard labour camps, the Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP, acronym in Spanish), and in 1980 deported through the Mariel boatlift. In the 1980s, anyone who tested HIV-positive, disproportionately gay people at the time, was quarantined away from home and work. In 2022, secular supporters of the capital-R Revolution who remained socially illiberal also opposed the Code.
The socially illiberal were not the only ones to oppose the Code. Socially liberal anti-government democrats may have also opposed the Code to demonstrate their rejection of the government and the Communist Party, even if they did not object to liberalising same-sex marriage.
On the other side, Raúl Castro, at first through his daughter Mariela Castro, promoted tolerance toward LGBTQI+ and then sponsored same-sex marriage and associated concepts for the Constitution and the Families Code. In 2022, pro-government sympathisers of his socially liberal views favoured the Code. Anti-government liberals who saw value in the Families Code also favoured it.
The referendum thus split government supporters and opponents. Nevertheless, the government saluted the referendum approval. Considering the votes of all who voted, 63 per cent approved of the Code (the remainder included blank, null, and negative votes). Voting turnout, at 74 per cent of registered voters, was much lower than for the referendum on the 2019 Constitution; approval of the Code was 24 percentage points below the approval rate for the Constitution. For the first time ever, in 2022 the proportion of registered voters supporting an official proposal fell below 50 per cent.
This referendum showed previously unseen levels of lawful organised opposition. Combined with the slightly more significant role of the National Assembly and somewhat greater responsiveness to civil society, the referendum process advanced a limited political liberalisation and democratisation.
Economic liberalisation policy innovations
The 11 July protests raged against economic hardships. The new limited economic liberalisation sought economic growth, popular support, and backing among private-sector entrepreneurs. This section focuses on the political significance of these economic reforms and their timing following the July 2021 protests.
In late July 2021, the Ministries of Justice, Finance and Prices, and Transportation issued Resolutions to enact long-delayed changes, among them deregulation of onerous price and tax policies, price controls on agriculture and livestock, and expanding private-sector participation in transportation (Ministerio 2021). Within four weeks of the 11 July nationwide protests, the Council of State approved decree laws to facilitate the creation and growth of private-sector micro-, small-, and medium-sized firms, non-agricultural cooperatives, and self-employment opportunities (Consejo 2021). The number and types of authorised private economic activities increased dramatically. The taxation rules that had hitherto penalised private-sector job creation eased.
Such approvals should have occurred immediately following the 2011 PCC Congress, which had endorsed such a reform programme, first published in draft form in the Fall of 2010. Notwithstanding this ten-year delay, on national television then-Minister for the Economy and Planning Alejandro Gil “assured [viewers] that it is totally incorrect to link the recent approval of these decree laws to the events of July 11 because [such interpretation] does not take into account the steps undertaken since the last two Party Congresses” (Alonso Falcón et al. 2021). The process that led to the adoption of these reforms did start in 2020 before the mass protests, in part as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic’s economic effects, but the 11 July protests accelerated the reform process.
Minister Gil did not explain that the economic reforms had slowed down, stopped, or been reversed before the 2016 Party Congress and in the years following it, for example, by extending price controls and restrictively micromanaging approval of private self-employment activities (Martínez García 2019; Silva Correa 2019). The protests helped to overcome bureaucratic resistance to reform.
In 2021, the government also retained and broadened its economic transparency policies, which mattered both for political communication and effective management, even when its results highlighted problems. Consider two examples. Illustrating this new transparency, the government reported that the 2021–2022 480,000 metric-tonne sugar harvest generated the “lowest production in over a century” (Tamayo León 2022b). And, notwithstanding the government’s efforts to collect taxes to close the fiscal deficit, the proportion of taxpayers who met their fiscal obligation reportedly fell from 93 per cent in 2021 to 70 per cent in 2022, that is, during the year following the July 2021 protests (Giráldez 2022).
Díaz-Canel (2022a) summarised the troubles well. After castigating US policies, in April 2022 he noted there were “water supply problems because of the drought, inflation, high prices, interminable queues, transportation problems, all of which generates burdens and discomfort; the electric power supply is unstable, causing exasperating blackouts …” He had always affirmed absolute reliance on state enterprises. However, he now suggested that “there should be harmonious growth within and between the non-state and the state sector”, a rare equivalence. Then, he argued that “we must have the Party [and labour unions] present in non-state small and private enterprises”, again akin to state enterprises. That will intrude in the private sector, but private-sector entrepreneurs might become Communist Party members, as in China and Vietnam.
Cuba’s economic liberalisation policy innovations, both national and sectoral, showed responsiveness to critics and protestors, but remained modest.
Social policy troubles and triumphs
The government and the Communist Party have long claimed and elicited support because of social policies. In response to the July 2021 protests, the government also sought to fine-tune these, with mixed results.
The improvement of housing conditions was one key commitment. However, nearly a year after the protests the outcome was poor. The May 2022 National Assembly audited the construction sector’s performance during the past year. The sector had completed only 21 per cent of the housing units planned for 2021 (calculations from Ramos López 2022). Two years later, at his monthly meeting with the provincial governments, the prime minister announced that the housing construction programme was still falling behind in all 15 provinces (Labacena Romero 2024).
Access to water is necessary to drink and clean, not just irrigate. President Díaz-Canel commented on a survey of attitudes of 7,100 people, 90 per cent of whom had a negative opinion regarding the water supply. The director of the Hydraulic Resources Institute agreed with the survey’s results (Redacción de Corresponsales 2024).
The improvement of public transportation has been another goal, especially in the City of Havana. However, the Havana Province Transportation Enterprise operated only 57 per cent of the buses that should have been running in 2021 and early 2022. The PCC newspaper Granma opened its comments section; respondents described transport in Havana as ‘horrible’, ‘terrible’, and ‘awful’ (calculation from Redacción Nacional 2022). Such opening of the newspaper’s pages for comments, however, also illustrates the new political decision toward greater transparency.
Government performance was also mixed regarding public health, long one of its successes. Excess mortality calculations indicate that over 60 thousand Cubans may have died from COVID-19, mostly between June and August 2021 – the epicentre of the protests – thereby placing Cuba at that time among the world’s 20 worst performers (COVID-19 2022). President Díaz-Canel acknowledged that the response was problematic in that trimester astride the protests. However, the decision to invest in Cuba’s own research and development to produce vaccines succeeded. Cuba’s public health system, collapsing as the Summer of 2021 began, rallied swiftly to vaccinate the population. It was a scientific, manufacturing, distribution, and political triumph in public health.
As the example of vaccinating the population shows, the Cuban government’s best performances still feature public health. Following the July 2021 protests, this mattered even more. However, the government’s record of social policy performance in other areas remained inadequate, even after the protests.
Conclusions and extensions
Valerie Bunce (1981) has shown that executive succession causes an increased likelihood of government policy innovation in communist countries to preserve the established order: Khrushchev after Stalin, Deng after Mao, and Raúl Castro after Fidel Castro. In each, much changed, even if innovation did not ensure success: Raúl Castro’s reform programme stalled during the economic counter-reform that he also had authorised in late 2015.
Díaz-Canel’s political biography emphasises bureaucratic caution, incrementalism, and loyalty to the inherited official legacy. Upon becoming president in 2018, he continued the economic counter-reform policies. Nevertheless, his appointment of Prime Minister Manuel Marrero in late 2019 cautiously restarted the paused economic reform. Díaz-Canel continued Raúl Castro’s LGBTQI+ friendly policies and increases in the number of Afro-descendants and women members of the Council of State. But Díaz-Canel also embraced the single-party system, the 2021–2022 repression, and the preponderance of central planning and state enterprises.
Díaz-Canel persisted in blaming all troubles – economic troubles and even the origins of the protests– on ‘imperialism’, a rhetorical trope of decreasing effectiveness. Consider Dziewanowski’s (1959: 265–266) narrative of Poland’s Poznan´ uprising in June 1956, where the government reported 53 persons killed and about 300 wounded:
After having repressed the revolt, the regime had to explain how it had happened that the workers had risen against the People’s Republic run by the Workers’ Party. Initially, the alleged role of ‘imperialistic agents’ and ‘provocateurs’… was emphasised. Even at this stage, however, the government did not dare to deny the fact that the workers had legitimate grievances against the regime. Gradually … the stress was shifted … to the wrongs and abuses of which the workers were victims.
Cubans are well aware of the adverse impact of US economic sanctions on their livelihood and the wider economy. They need not rely on government reminders. The reimposition and deepening of US sanctions during the Donald Trump presidency (2017–2021) curtailed the flow of US visitors, severely injured the private sector that had arisen, constrained private remittances to individuals and small businesses, and drastically impeded personal and professional financial transactions. Such sanctions also make it more difficult, and undermine, the effectiveness of some Cuban government’s responses regarding the economy. But, as in Poland in the mid-1950s and elsewhere, many Cubans want the nation’s leaders to take responsibility for fixing what they can fix, external sanctions notwithstanding. President Díaz-Canel and, even more, Prime Minister Marrero have slightly shifted their own speech-making accordingly, but insufficiently. 3 Blame-shifting rarely suffices.
Cuba’s July 2021 and lesser protests revealed vulnerabilities. Having long blocked independent civil society organisations and moderate opposition groups, the government and the Communist Party faced thousands of angry citizens without intermediaries. The collapse of Communist Party governments in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovenia all began with mass protests. They signalled the weaknesses of the existing order and posed the possibility of alternatives (Bunce 2003: 172). Government response fails when rulers misdiagnose the causes of discontent.
However, from their perspective, the approaches that President Díaz-Canel and Prime Minister Marrero followed have achieved near-term success. They belatedly recognised the hardships people endure, words that now follow denunciations of imperialism. The state’s grip on the private sector loosened. Economic reforms have endured, though their scope was constrained in 2024. Greater elite inclusion of Afro-descendants and women has changed the leadership’s demographics. The social liberalisation opening to the LGBTQI+ community is genuine. Political accountability is more transparent. In a democratisation gambit, the government and the PCC discovered their weaknesses in a referendum. The Supreme Court’s willingness to shorten prison sentences imposed by lower courts, and the national prosecutors’ choice of non-prison sentences for a minority of the arrested protestors, implies softer approaches.
As Edward Schatz argues in his analysis of two former Soviet states, a soft authoritarianism that “relies more centrally on the means of persuasion than on the means of coercion, although coercion remains a part of the ruling elite’s arsenal” may be more effective (Schatz 2009: 203).
On 17 March 2024, this hypothesis was tested. Nonviolent protests broke out in the cities of Santiago and Bayamo, and the towns of Cobre (Santiago province) and Santa Marta (Matanzas province). Protestors shouted their demands for a better reliable food supply and an end to electric power blackouts. This time the government’s response was much more effective; official and independent sources agreed on the facts of the protests (Cubadebate 2024; Capote 2024; El Toque 2024a; El Toque 2024b).
In Santiago, where hundreds of people protested, PCC First Secretary for the province, Beatriz Johnson Urrutia, went directly to meet the protestors on the streets, taking along other provincial officials. They listened to the concerns, explained the constraints that had created the deplorable food shortages and power blackouts, and dialogued with the protestors. They agreed to adjust the food supply right away. The First Secretary’s subsequent press release noted that the protestors were respectful and listened attentively.
President Díaz-Canel and the official media acknowledged the reasons for the protests. The president commented: “There was a dialogue with those [protesting on the streets], and that is legitimate. We also understand that, with the hardship that everyone is facing these times, people must have sources of unhappiness, but they also must learn what is being done …” (Sautié 2024) Thus, the government’s coercive responses were also limited. During the time of the protests, the Internet’s social networks were blocked and five people were arrested and held. Compared to the response to the July 2021 protests, this was a significant change. And, as Julio Antonio Fernández Estrada (2024) has written, the theme of the protest was to demand that “the government should meet its obligations,” not that the government should collapse.
Cuban officials have followed a coping pattern that combined toolkit instruments from repression and its temperance to some instances of liberalisation. This leadership has competently protected the established order in the near term, more effectively so in early 2024. It has opted for alternatives to repression whenever it can, with a key constraint: preserve the capital-R Revolution. It remains an open question whether it will succeed in the longer term.