'Astonishing': Cuban Protesters Take to the Streets (VIDEO)

Freedom protests. 

Whenever protests break out like this --- anywhere in the world --- demonstrators always wave the American flag while calling for freedom. The U.S. remains the beacon of liberty for billions of people the world over, and radical, anti-American leftists can't stand that.

At the New York Times, "Cubans Denounce ‘Misery’ in Biggest Protests in Decades":

MIAMI — Shouting “Freedom” and other anti-government slogans, thousands of Cubans took to the streets in cities around the country on Sunday to protest food and medicine shortages, in a remarkable eruption of discontent not seen in nearly 30 years.

Thousands of people marched through San Antonio de los Baños, southwest of Havana, with videos streaming live on Facebook for nearly an hour before they suddenly disappeared. As the afternoon wore on, other videos appeared from demonstrations elsewhere, including Palma Soriano, in the country’s southeast. Hundreds of people also gathered in Havana, where a heavy police presence preceded their arrival.

“The people are dying of hunger!” one woman shouted during a protest filmed in the province of Artemisa, in the island’s west. “Our children are dying of hunger!”

One clip circulating on Twitter showed protesters overturning a police car in Cardenas, 90 miles east of Havana. Another video showed people looting from one of the much-detested government-run stores, which sell wildly overpriced items in currencies most Cubans do not possess.

In a country known for repressive crackdowns on dissent, the rallies were widely viewed as astonishing. Activists and analysts called it the first time that so many people had openly protested against the Communist government since the so-called Maleconazo uprising, which exploded in the summer of 1994 into a huge wave of Cubans leaving the country by sea.

Carolina Barrero, a Cuban activist, went even further. “It is the most massive popular demonstration to protest the government that we have experienced in Cuba since ’59,” she said by text message, referring to the year Fidel Castro took power. She called the public outpouring on Sunday “spontaneous, frontal and forceful.”

“What has happened is enormous,” she added.

The protests were set off by a dire economic crisis in Cuba, where the coronavirus pandemic has cut off crucial tourism dollars. People now spend hours in line each day to buy basic food items. Many have been unable to work because restaurants and other businesses have remained on lockdown for months.

The desperate conditions have triggered an uptick in migration by both land and sea.

Since the start of the fiscal year last October, the U.S. Coast Guard has intercepted more than 512 Cubans at sea, compared with 49 for the entire previous year. On Saturday, the Coast Guard suspended the search for nine Cuban migrants whose vessel overturned at sea off Key West, Fla.

The Cuban government attributes its longstanding economic problems to the American trade embargo, which cuts off its access to financing and imports. But the pandemic has worsened conditions, and in Matanzas, east of Havana, some patients and their families have resorted to posting videos on YouTube of furious people screaming about the lack of medicine and doctors.

The Cuban Ministry of Health website says the nation of 11 million now has about 32,000 active cases of Covid-19. It reported 6,923 daily cases and 47 deaths on Sunday, breaking its prior record, set just Friday. Only about 15 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, the government said.

The protest movement gained momentum after a number of celebrities started tweeting with the hashtag #SOSCuba...