Cuba lifts food and drug customs restrictions after protest Reuters

Sarah Marsh and Nelson Acosta

Havana (Reuters)-Cuba announced on Wednesday that it will temporarily lift restrictions on the amount of food and medicine carried by passengers. This is clearly a small concession to the demands of protesters who took to the streets last weekend.

Thousands of people joined a nationwide wave of protests on Sunday, protesting the shortage of basic commodities, restrictions on civil liberties, and the government’s handling of the surge in COVID-19 infections, the worst unrest in the communist country in decades.

The government blamed the riots on the difficulties caused by U.S.-funded “counter-revolutionaries” using the decades-old U.S. trade embargo. Washington tightened the trade embargo during the pandemic and pushed the Cuban economy to the edge.

Some countries and the United Nations call on governments to respect citizens’ rights to express themselves. Other countries such as Mexico https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mexico-foreign-minister-says-looking-into-humanitarian-aid-cuba-2021-07-13 indicate that the best way to help the Cuban people will be It is the United States that relaxes sanctions.

In Cuba, an increasing number of well-known artists nL8N2OQ0DK from the salsa band Los Van Van to the jazz pianist Chucho Valdes criticized the way the authorities handled the riots and urged them to listen to the protesters instead of fighting them.

Although access to social media and messaging services is still restricted, activists said that the intermittent internet outage, nL1N2OP1US, aimed at curbing any further riots, eased slightly on Wednesday.

Officials blamed the social media campaign under the hashtag #SOSCuba on calling for humanitarian assistance to fuel the protests, saying it was initiated by mercenaries backed by the United States and aimed at destabilizing a country ruled by the Communist Party.

They compare their push to the U.S.-backed efforts to provide relief to Venezuela in 2019 https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/us-aid-effort-venezuela-was-not-aligned-with-humanitarian- principles -audit-finds-2021-04-30 ended with a violent confrontation on the Colombian border.

Nonetheless, one of the requirements of the movement is for the government to remove customs restrictions on food, medicine, and hygiene products that are lacking in countries with the worst economic crisis since the collapse of the former ally of the Soviet Union.

Prime Minister Manuel Marrero (Manuel Marrero) said on Wednesday that the government will start to do so next Monday and will not lift the restrictions until the end of the year.

“This is a request made by many travelers, and it is necessary to make this decision,” he said together with President Miguel Diaz-Canel at a roundtable on national television.

Given that there are currently few flights into this Caribbean island country, which is experiencing the worst coronavirus outbreak since the pandemic began, it is not clear how much difference this move will make.

Yoani Sanchez, a government critic who runs the news website 14ymedio, quickly tweeted that such concessions were not enough to appease those who protested on Sunday.

“We don’t want breadcrumbs, we want freedom, we want it now wwww,” she wrote. “The street has already said: We are not afraid.”

Cubans said that since Sunday, they have been frustrated by the interruption of the mobile Internet and restricted access to social media and messaging platforms.

Andrea Lopez, a Havana resident, said: “No one has been able to contact for many days.” “My husband is in Mexico, and I couldn’t speak to him.”

According to Cubalex, an exiled human rights organization, more than 200 people have been detained during or after the protest, and only a few have been released so far.

Diaz-Canel said there are three types of protesters; counter-revolutionaries, criminals, and people with legitimate setbacks. State-run television broadcast a scene of a group of people robbing a store and another attacking an empty police car.

Officials of the Ministry of the Interior stated in a later TV program that some detainees will be pursued for crimes such as incitement to violence, contempt, robbery and destruction of public property, and that these crimes will be sentenced to long-term imprisonment.