Entitled The Hidden Hand of the US Blockade Sparks Cuba Protests, the article states that the brutal economic war against the island for more than 60 years explains the cause of recent events.

In 1960, then Deputy Secretary of State Lester Mallory explicitly called for ‘denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government,’ recalls the article, signed by Medea Benjamin, co-founder of pacifist organization Code Pink, and Leonardo Flores, an expert on Latin American politics.

It argues that the unrest was exaggerated by the Western press and Cuban Americans who have been predicting the imminent fall of Cuban government for 60 years.

Media outlets like The New York Times wrote about ‘hundreds of Cubans’ while Reuters described them as thousands. In either case, Cuba has a population of 11 million people, it adds.

The protests pale in comparison, both in terms of turnout and in state repression, to mass mobilizations that have rocked Colombia, Haiti, Chile, Ecuador and other Latin American countries over the past few years—or even Portland, Oregon, or Ferguson, Missouri, US, it points out.

Moreover, US media have paid little attention to the counter protesters, who have gone out into the streets to express their support for the government and Cuban Revolution, it highlights.

This includes Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who marched in the streets of Havana after denouncing the protests as an attempt to ‘fracture the unity of the people,’ the article emphasizes.

Benjamin and Flores stressed that Cuba saves its people from a suffocating scenario, in particular health policies to protect the population from the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Cuba has already proven that two of the five Covid-19 vaccines that it is developing are successful in preventing coronavirus infections and has vaccinated over two million people with their locally produced vaccines, the article notes.

The columnists did not overlooked the fact that the US economic warfare on Cuba has always been coupled with other strategies to overthrow the Cuban government.

These include assassination attempts, support for terrorists (like Luis Posada Carriles, who blew up a Cuban airliner in 1976, killing 73 people), an attempted invasion and millions of dollars spent on ‘soft’ power.

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