The Cuban music scene is dynamic. Music students form garage bands. Afro-Cuban women break barriers in rap. Jazz bands perform in art galleries. Aspiring artists record songs via cellphones and distribute music via CDs. On Feb. 16, 2021, seven Cuban artists released a reggaeton song, “Patria y Vida” (“Homeland and Life”), the title a play on the Cuban revolutionary slogan “Homeland or death.”
As lively as Cuban culture may be, Cuba has a zombie regime. Officials no longer believe in Fidel and Raul Castro’s revolution. They may be proud Cubans, but few are Marxists. Many have children and grandchildren in the United States who migrated to America for a better life. The situation has seldom been so bad. Five percent of the country has fled over the past year, often flying visa-free to Nicaragua to join the migrant caravans through Mexico to the southern border of the U.S. They leave, and those who remain have no faith in the troika of nonagenarians who run Cuba behind the scenes. For most Cubans, the government is a black box that is inaccessible and divorced from reality.
It was against this backdrop that “Patria y Vida” went viral. Its lyrics were enticing:
“Do not demean us and treat us like animals.”
“No more lies! My people demand freedom! No more doctrines! No longer shall we cry, ‘Fatherland or death’ but ‘Fatherland and life!’ And begin to build what we dreamed of. What they destroyed with their hands.”
“No longer shall flow the blood of those who dare to think differently. Who told you Cuba is yours? Indeed, Cuba is for all my people.”
The chorus became a slogan of protest: “It’s all over now! You [live in 19]59; me, 2020. It’s all over now!”
On July 11, 2021, protests erupted across Cuba in dozens of towns and cities, with “Patria y Vida” as their anthem. They shook the communist regime to its core. For years, the Cubans harassed, monitored, and imprisoned a handful of oppositionists who had the attention of Washington and other Western capitals, but the “Patria y Vida” protests were widespread and spontaneous, with crowds chanting, “It’s all over now!” to police and regime thugs.
Cubans are no strangers to repression, but suppression is easiest in the dark. Some press were in Havana, but the brutality in the countryside was huge. In Havana, police arrested supposed ringleaders, all white, but in the countryside, they imprisoned more than 2,000 protesters whom they accused of rioting, destruction of property, and general mayhem. While the regime released the white ringleaders in a matter of days on condition of exile, perhaps 1,000 political prisoners, overwhelmingly black, still linger in Cuban prisons.
Many progressives lionize Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Their visages dominate the Plaza of the Revolution in Havana, across from a tower that looks like a poor man’s Washington Monument dedicated to Cuban founding father Jose Marti. Tourists purchase baseball caps and T-shirts emblazoned with Che’s image, and college students in America and Europe wear them without any sense of irony.
It is a phenomenon Cubans ridicule for two reasons. First, they note expensive swag undermines everything Che supposedly stood for, and second, whatever myth Che built, in reality, he was a psychopathic murderer.
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In Washington, self-flagellation is the order of the day. Liberals applaud former President Barack Obama’s outreach to Cuba and criticize former President Donald Trump for rolling it back, but viewing Cuba only through the lens of American politics is wrong. The Cuban government has agency. It had the opportunity to reciprocate and reform but chose not to do so. The Cuban military vacuumed up dollars, but the regime did little to open its economy, unravel arcane regulations, or end restrictions on freedom. The Cuban government uses the U.S. embargo as an excuse but ultimately cares only about power, not people.
As the “Patria y Vida” protesters understood, the regime was the problem, not America. It is bad enough that progressives ignore the reality of the Cuban regime. It is worse that they chant slogans about “Black Lives Matter” in the U.S. but ignore the Cuban regime’s racist repression of Afro-Cuban protesters. It is time to demand their freedom.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.