Across the world, massive protests have erupted. Cuba, South Africa, Ethiopia, Haiti, Columbia, Lebanon and a few other countries that we don’t have time to mention are all seeing uproars, to different levels and with different levels of legitimacy. But, the correlations are all highly important, and we need to pay attention to the trend that continues to be illustrated by these demonstrations.
So, what we’re going to do is simply go over the details of each of those countries, some at greater length than others, before we look at what they teach us about the world we live in.
So, to start with by far the most publicised and by far the smallest ones, Cuba. This island nation, ruled for 60 years by the Castro family before Miguel Díaz-Canel took over in 2019. As the media has made abundantly clear over the last week, they are a communist, authoritarian regime.
What happened recently is a small number of protesters, some news reports say in the thousands, while the New York Times says in the hundreds, began a demonstration, protesting a lack of food and medical supplies. That was the basis for these marches. It wasn’t originally the universal anti-Communism that the media is making it out to be, it was a march about basic needs that Cubans are struggling to get.
There are a few reasons that they cannot get these supplies. Firstly, the pandemic. Naturally, when most of the world’s economy shuts down, a poor country that already struggles to trade with other nations - we’ll get to that in a moment - is going to find it near-impossible to provide for their system, especially when they produce little.
However, the main cause of all of this suffering is the US embargo. For decades, pretty much since the Castro regime took over, the American government has been desperate to get rid of them by any means, including harming innocent Cuban citizens. This embargo has had disastrous results for the Cuban people. Basically, the US does not trade with the small island, and any company that does so does at risk of facing sanctions. This means that Cuba’s biggest trading partner is Venezuela, another country that is already under immense US sanctioning, and, as a result, can barely provide for its own citizens. What this embargo means for Cuban citizens is that they can’t get drinkable water, or parts to fix medical machinery, including things that we in the West take for granted, like x-ray machines, all the way to the very important, life saving equipment. By the way, the United Nations has passed a resolution every year since 1992 calling for an end to the embargo, with the US and Israel being the only two opposers to the resolution.
Of course, an aspect of this does also just come down to the fact that the Cuban government is just bad, but the fact that they can barely import anything doesn’t help them in the slightest.
It is also worth mentioning that there are currently counter-protests going on that are significantly bigger than the anti-government ones, not that the media considers that worth mentioning.
Unfortunately, many American people, particularly right-wing Democrats and Republicans, don’t support lifting the the embargo, and propose a very different solution: air strikes. Before you think I’m merely strawmanning them to gain cheap political points, the mayor of Miami, the city home to the most Cubans outside the nation itself, had this to say of Fox News: “I don’t think the embargo is cruel at all and I think that the Cuban people are not asking for a lifting of the embargo. They’re going out on the streets every single day talking about the failure of the communist regime to provide for its people and I don’t understand why that’s so difficult for people to understand. It has failed for six decades, and what should be contemplated right now is a coalition, a potential military action in Cuba.” That is borderline insane. The basic premise is “the Cuban people are struggling so let’s blow them up.” He is proposing a war crime. And, unfortunately, that is a very popular position among centrists Democrats and Republicans. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, refused to take air strikes off the table.
Look, I am not supportive of the Cuban government. They are an authoritarian regime, which I think is by far the most dangerous ideology. If a government has or wants to have complete control over its people, - and we have a story coming out about the Biden White House wanting that in the next few days - I can’t support that. But, if we want to prove that they are a failure, give them a chance to be. Don’t give them the excuse of the embargo. If they are going to be a failure, make that because of them, and not us, and then the majority of Cuban people may actually come round to believe you in saying that their government is bad, rather than the current overwhelming support for them.
Moving on to South Africa, and what are possibly the least justified protests of the bunch. Former President Jacob Zuma was arrested on corruption charges, and as a result hundreds if not thousands of businesses, both large and small, have been looted and destroyed.
The reason for this is that Zuma was the first Zulu President. Zulu’s are one of the poorer classes of black South Africans, and, of course, black South Africans already faced massive levels of discrimination under Apartheid, so to be poorer than most other black people in a situation like that is awful. Zuma, a Zulu, became President, in what was considered a massive victory for his people. But, a mere month after leaving office, it was announced that he was being charged with eruption. A public investigation and trial ensued, which resulted in him being ordered to testify at a commission. As a result, he was sentenced to 15 months in jail, a sentence which began of July 7, after he turned himself in.
Chaos ensued, with many Zulu’s feeling that he had been discriminated against racially.
Now, it does look as though he was massively corrupt, although I admit to not knowing much about the matter, but that didn’t stop the massive protests, and the disaster that they left in their wake, with thousands of small businesses losing their buildings and many of their products in the looting.
Haiti’s protests are perhaps the most interesting. The right-wing, American-backed President Jovenel Moïse, who was supposed to be up for re-election last year but canceled it indefinitely, supposedly due to Covid, was recently assassinated by a hit team made up of 26 Colombians and 2 Haitian-Americans, one of whom supposedly led the heist.
This man was effectively a dictator, who led based on a deeply flawed election in which 80% of the country either couldn’t or wouldn’t vote. But, because that is supposedly ‘democracy’, the American government by and large supported him, especially in his successful bid to overstay his term.
American history in Haiti is fascinating, and horrifying, as Krystal Ball’s amazing segment on her show Breaking Points showed us. To recap, American involvement there goes all the way back to the early 19th century, when the first American imperialists were taking slaves there to work on sugar plantations. The slaves then rose up to defeat their colonial oppressors in what Ball described as “the most successful slave result in history.” However, since then, America has consistently “undermined, invaded, embargoed, fomented coups and propped up dictators in whatever way we felt would best guarantee that America’s elite could continue profiting in and exploiting Haiti.” The US, among other things: refused to recognize Haiti as a sovereign nation for 60 years because plantation owners worried about their own slaves following their Haitian brothers and sisters and revolting; a 20 year occupation led by President Woodrow Wilson to steal their gold reserves; the propping up of murderous dictators François and Jean-Claude Duvalier because they were anti-communists, while ignoring the fact that they were destroying every possible Democratic institution in the country as well as torturing and murdering pretty much anyone they wanted with death squads; both Bush Presidents separately deposed of the massively popular Leftist President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to protect US business interests; a US blockade of Haiti during GWB’s time in office even further crippled the impoverished people of Haiti; and President Obama’s state department, headed up by one Hillary Clinton, worked with contractors to block a minimum wage hike in Haiti that would’ve seen textile workers earn US$5 a day rather than $3. Again, thanks to Krystal Ball for highlighting all of this in her amazing monologue.
This all led to the recent assassination of the President, which was carried out by 26 Colombians and 2 Haitian Americans. All of these men were recruited by CTU, a Florida-based security firm. And, on top of that, a Doctor from Florida, Christian Sanon, reportedly hired all of these men to carry out the deed. He had a large amount of debt, but that somehow didn’t stop him from paying all 28 of these men US$3000 every month to carry this out. He somehow believed that he would be made President, although nobody quite knows how that would’ve worked out. Some of the assassins have said that their plan was to take Sanon to the Presidential palace, supposedly on Moïse’s orders after they had served him with an arrest warrant for Sanon, who would then be somehow installed after Moïse had been slaughtered, although, of course, something very different ended up happening.
It is also worth mentioning that some of the men involved in this operation are former FBI and DEA informants, involved in Haitian hits, although, based on the fact that the Moïse government was American-backed, it seems unlikely that these organizations played a role in his death.
Who becomes President now is interesting. There are multiple versions of the constitution, and some have different responses to a scenario like this happening. Some have the chief justice of the Supreme Court taking the job, while others have the Prime Minister. However, the chief justice died of Covid nineteen days ago, and hadn’t yet been replaced, while the Prime Minister had just been fired, and his replacement hadn’t yet been inaugurated. The opposition parties are also forming a coalition, which they claims makes them the rightful leaders, so it will be interesting to see what happens now.
The protests in Haiti against his government have been going on for months, and his assassination have only made them more widely publicised.
There is also a crazy civil war going on in Ethiopia. Abiy Ahmed, who was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2019, has taken quite a turn from that height and has begun an ethnic cleansing of the Ethiopian Tigray people, who, despite being the minority, ruled Ethiopia for a long time until Ahmed came into power. The government forces, who are aligned with the Eritrean people, are managing to lose to the Tigrayans. Ahmed was awarded the Peace Prize in 2019 for coming to a peace deal with the Eritreans, before allying with them to conduct ethnic cleansing.
This is a full on civil war. The death toll is rising every single day, and is currently at an enormously high 1.4 million people.
This instance speaks to a smaller trend, in which winners of the Nobel Peace Prize go on afterwards to commit War Crimes. Obama is the same. As is Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar.
Colombia has been having daily protests for months, as the people protest the right-wing authoritarian government there.
The initial incident that kicked off these protests was a tax reform bill that increased the tax burden on poor and middle-class families while doing little to apply tax laws to the rich, although the protest has since become much broader. The police have had massive crackdowns and severe violence against protestors, which has barely been reported on.
The protests are mainly focused on the inequality between the rich and the poor in Colombia, with a more fair healthcare system and a pushback against police brutality being the two main points of this protest.
Very similar protests are taking place across Lebanon. Like Ethiopia, these protests were kick started by taxes focused on the working class, with focuses on increased taxes on gasoline and tobacco, and have since become a broader critique of the government.
Like Colombia, there have been countless cases of police brutality, with journalists being arrested and protesters being killed.
Added into the mix is the Beirut explosions last year, which killed 207 people and injured 6000.
There are many countries that we don’t have time to mention, and those countries’ protests are just as important as these ones.
The 3 main trends that I want to explore concerning this are climate, authoritarianism and the media.
So, to start with climate, and a very interesting correlation between most protests. They seem to take place more in warmer weather. You get more protests in warmer countries than you do colder ones, as people become less tolerant. And, with the very real threat of climate change, protests like the ones we have seen recently are set to become even more common.
Probably the most important of these three points is authoritarianism. What do Cuba, South Africa, Haiti, Ethiopia and Lebanon all have in common? An authoritarian government. It isn’t so much about what they try to enforce, it’s more about the fact that they try to police what you can and can’t do in society more than developed countries do. This isn’t so much about communism being better or worse than fascism, it’s about governments partaking in those systems facing pushback, that would almost certainly be smaller if they weren’t authoritarian.
The one that affects us most currently in the West is the media. We are getting a whole lot of information about what is happening in Cuba at the moment, and the tiniest amount of reporting about other countries, in which the humanitarian crises are probably bigger. And I don’t buy the argument about Cuba being more relevant because of geographic location either, given that Haiti is only slightly further away, and we get little reporting about what happened there, despite the story being the more sensational of the two. It seems to me that they are highlighting the Communist failure because that fits their narrative of communism always failing, while other countries with more right-wing governments failing contradicts that. Now, I’m not a communist in any way shape or form, but I will criticize all systems that I disagree with relatively equally, rather than singling one in particular out, unless that system plays a significant and direct disastrous role in American politics or foreign policy.
The takeaway from this all should be that, while we need to look at these to see the trends so we can try to avoid replicating them, we also need to understand each country’s individual situation to know how the people of that country are actually being affected, and what role our tax money plays in their suffering, as it has in many countries, particularly in Cuba and Haiti out of the countries on this list.