JUDY WOODRUFF: In Cuba, Police are out in force tonight in the capital, Havana, after
thousands of protesters rose up Sunday.
They took to the streets across the country, in the largest demonstrations against communist
rule in a generation.
Nick Schifrin begins our coverage.
NICK SCHIFRIN: On the streets of Havana, thousands of Cubans walked to the center of the capital
to demand their freedom.
GEOVANIS GONZALEZ, Demonstrator (through translator): We are here because of the repression against
the people. They are starving us to death. We have no house. We have nothing. But they
have money to build hotels.
PEDRO DEL CUETO, Dissident Protester (through translator): Homeland and life. Down with
the dictatorship. Down with the Castros. Down with the communist dogs.
NICK SCHIFRIN: They filmed on their phones and spread the call to demonstrate via Internet
they have only recently been able to access, first San Antonio de los Banos, south of Havana,
and then to hundreds of cities throughout the country.
It wasn't all peaceful. Ninety miles east of Havana, protesters overturned a cop car.
In response, police arrested dozens, and plainclothes officers administered the state's justice.
MICHEL RODRIGUEZ, Demonstrator (through translator): State security beat me and my daughter. They
beat us because we were walking down the street.
NICK SCHIFRIN: The nationwide release of anger from protesters willing to personally yell
at Cuba's president, the product of acute shortages of COVID vaccines and other medicines,
despite a COVID outbreak, and more Cubans getting sick, anger over inflation that could
hit 500 percent this year.
And because of Trump administration sanctions, Cubans no longer have access to remittances
that were once their second largest source of income. But it's also the product of longstanding
outrage over an economy that for years failed to lift up working-class Cubans.
Yesterday, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel accused demonstrators of being U.S. sellouts.
Today, he blamed the 70-year-old U.S. trade embargo.
MIGUEL DIAZ-CANEL, Cuban President (through translator): Lift the blockade, and we will
see what our people are capable of.
NICK SCHIFRIN: But in the White House today, President Biden took the protesters' side.
JOE BIDEN, President of the United States: The Cuban people are demanding their freedom
from an authoritarian regime. The United States stands firmly with the people of Cuba as they
assert their universal rights.
And we call on the government, the government of Cuba, to refrain from violence.
NICK SCHIFRIN: It's been 27 years since Cubans protested en masse. But those demonstrations
were only in Havana. Yesterday's protests were across the country, spontaneous, and
leaderless.
And to talk about the significance of these protests, we turn to Lillian Guerra, professor
of Cuban history at the University of Florida.
Lillian Guerra, welcome to the "NewsHour."
So, how historic were yesterday's demonstrations?
LILLIAN GUERRA, University of Florida: Well, they were really unprecedented.
We have not seen anything like this in 60 years or more in Cuba. They are not just extraordinary
in their magnitude, but they are also geographically vast in terms of the numbers of cities and
places where they have taken place.
And the quality of people's denunciation, the diversity of voices, but also that people
are openly calling this a dictatorship, and today even calling for the end of communism
openly in Holguin, which is far eastern Cuba, this is all really uncharted waters.
NICK SCHIFRIN: We reported some of Cubans' most recent concerns over COVID, over medical
shortages, inflation, but also long-term economic hopelessness.
What do you think lead to yesterday's demonstrations?
LILLIAN GUERRA: I think this is a culmination of three decades of the Cuban government making
reforms that really have most served its own stabilization and consolidation of control
over the capitalist sector of the economy that was created by the Communist Party in
1991, really because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the need to do something
to maintain power.
So what we have is a lot of anger. We have now multigenerational disappointment with
the lack of change. And, most recently, we have a lot of hypocrisy on the part of the
Cuban state that claims it is so humanitarian and so interested in its people's welfare,
but really has not even been able to supply people with Tylenol and basic food, and also
will not admit -- and that is the real -- the key here, that the new leadership and the
old leadership have held hands.
And they will not admit that anything is wrong with their model or their one-party rule.
NICK SCHIFRIN: And, in fact, today, we have seen the Cuban government blamed United States
for these protests, also shut off some access to the Internet.
Do you believe the government is willing to make some of the changes that are required
to respond to those longer -- more medium- and long-term concerns expressed by the population?
LILLIAN GUERRA: I think that they are very unwilling.
In April, the Cuban Communist Party held its latest Congress. They said at the Congress
that they were committed to the idea that social media and the Internet and all the
means by which Cubans are expressing them are an affront to the nation, that they are
anti-Cuban and that they are a source of subversion.
So, that was several months ago, yes, but, so far, the tune has not changed. And the
story line has pretty much gotten narrower, as Miguel Diaz-Canel has gone on television
accusing those protesting of being vulgar criminals, of being mercenaries.
And none of that is believable. The people who are protesting are your neighbors, the
people you know. There are people of all backgrounds. And the diversity of that community of Cubans
in every place that they are protesting makes it really difficult for this to be discredited
according to the traditional means.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Candidate Biden promised to lift some of the Trump administration actions
on Cuba. The Biden administration is close to finalizing its Cuba policy.
Let me play you a clip from an interview I did earlier today with Mike Gonzalez. He's
a Heritage Foundation senior fellow who says, after these protests, the Biden administration
should not open up to the Cuba.
MIKE GONZALEZ, Heritage Foundation: I think this is now off the table, because it will
be widely seen and it will be a lifeline to a thuggish, murderous totalitarian regime
that has been rejected by its own people.
So I don't see how Biden can send back an ambassador or lift punitive measures that
Trump imposed.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Lillian Guerra, what do you think the Biden ministration should do following
yesterday's protests?
LILLIAN GUERRA: I really think that they should do the opposite of what this gentleman just
suggested.
If he were to take a position of loosening the embargo or doing the kinds of things that
Obama did that really poked holes into it, that would really call the Cuban state's bluff.
I mean, all I can say is that everything that is going wrong in Cuba is the result of the
United States and the United States' blockade, as they call it, the embargo, when Cubans
on the ground know that it's really what they say is the internal blockade.
I mean, that phrase has been used now for more than 30 years to describe the kinds of
controls that the Communist Party exercises. And so I think we need to stop being the aggressor.
We need to stop taking on the scripted role that has been our role since 1960, at least
1961. It's time to be a radical friend of the Cuban people, even as we maintain our
criticisms and perhaps some of our sanctions certainly against the Revolutionary Armed
Forces.
NICK SCHIFRIN: And that debate over U.S. policy continues.
Lillian Guerra, thank you very much.
LILLIAN GUERRA: Thank you.