Three years after the events of July 11, 2021 (11-J), it is important to realize what the significance of that day was, and where we are now. The import of the national uprising in 2021 is that it revealed that most of the population rejected a failed and repressive regime, and that the idea that the Cuban people were living happily was a fallacy manufactured and exported to the world.
And the great lesson reiterated on that July 11 is that nothing can be secured from a dictatorship without standing up to it. It should be recalled that the epic protest known as the Maleconazo, in 1994, immediately precipitated the opening of markets for Cuban farmers and self-employment, the free movement of the dollar, a migration agreement with the United States, and better conditions for foreign investment.
In turn, the 11-J brought (finally!) the much-delayed approval of MSMEs, announced by presidential decree on August 19 (five weeks after the popular rebellion!), later made law after being published in the Official Gazette on September 21. It also led the Government to conclude that, by facilitating a mass exodus to the United States, it could get rid of all the country's troublemakers, and even reap financial benefits. This was the rationale behind their agreements with Nicaragua and the Mexican cartels with close ties to Havana.
The Bayonet Option
The myth of governability was shattered, and they have not been able to put it back together again. Until 11-J it seemed that the Cuban people were content, if not resigned, to live under that system, and that the opposition was reduced to a few thousand dissatisfied citizens grouped in different independent civil society organizations. On that day, however, it was clear that, in addition to the organized dissidents, there was also widespread dissatisfaction, a profound unrest among millions of people all across the country.
Since then (and this is already a legacy of that day) the idea that dissidents in Cuba are limited to a small minority was definitively debunked. Now it is known that there are millions on the island who disagree with the status quo, not to mention the 1.79 million who left between 2022 and 2023. This unorganized dissent includes disaffected elements within the Government's own ranks, civil servants, members of the military, and others who suffer the consequences of the current policies that are being applied.
Ever since then, however, the elite's reaction has not been to sit down and reflect on the things that needed to be changed to face this structural and multi-systemic crisis. On the contrary, it has tried to respond to Cuba's ungovernability with more repression.
All the country's laws have been strengthened to crack down on the slightest expression of opposition or dissent. A 21-year-old girl from Nuevitas, Camagüey, was recently sentenced to 15 years in prison for uploading content to social media that the government described as "enemy propaganda" and constituting "sedition." This is a clear sign that the regime has not internalized the essence of the new phenomenon it is facing, for the first time in 65 years. The Government does not understand that repression can temporarily hold off a social explosion, but it does not ensure governability in the medium and long term.
MSMEs: appeasement one month after 11-J and a mask to circumvent the Helms-Burton Act
To render Cuba governable the only thing to be done is to change the regime, the system of government that has ruled until today and that remains, essentially, totalitarian, as not one genuinely private company exists in the country. The MSME Law, much touted in the media, was conceived as both a measure to appease the population five weeks after the July 11 protests and a new strategy to circumvent the embargo, but what is required to support a private sector in Cuba is to change Cuban laws so that they guarantee full economic freedom for citizens. The internal blockade is the only thing that prevents this.
Cuba's famous MSMEs are not genuine private companies, but rather a controlled strategy to try to get the US to recognize them as such, and authorize economic, commercial, financial and technological relations with them, which would be permitted under the Helms-Burton Act if they really constituted a private sector, as Madeleine Albright specified on January 5, 1999. Cuba's current MSMEs, however, do not comprise that independent private sector that President Bill Clinton, through his Secretary of State, announced his willingness to open US transactions up to. Several national discriminations and regulations prevent this.
The first discrimination imposed by the MSME Law is that one has to be authorized by the State to have even a micro-business. The applicant must request a permit, which can be denied without any explanation. This reality makes it possible to discriminate against the applicant for beliefs and ideologies those in the government do not approve of. The second discrimination is that nationals are only allowed to register micro, small and medium-sized enterprises in certain sectors, without exceeding limits on their expansion, without the freedom to set prices, hire or dismiss their workers, export and import directly, or seek foreign investment partners directly, all this while large foreign capital is welcome without most of these restrictions. Why, instead of authorizing MSMEs, don't they authorize Cuban private companies without any limitations?
Mipymeros are people who have, finally, been permitted to register their business if they manage to pass the Government's ideological and practical fidelity litmus tests, showing they are not connected with the opposition or with critical ideas of this new massive dissent. This is not the kind of businessman that President Clinton wanted to build bridges with. A portion of them, to top it off, are managed by people well connected to Cuba's elite, and, in other cases, are entities that are really under the control of the military holding company known as GAESA. In these cases, they are registered as private entities using front men so that the Cuban oligarchy - and even the Russian one, today sanctioned by the war in Ukraine - can immediately access US banks through them if this is ultimately authorized.
In recent days they have insisted on further strengthening the centralist and statist features of their Soviet economic model that they imported to the country and that destroyed the Cuban economy, which, together with that of Argentina, Venezuela and Uruguay, ranked among the top in Latin American in 1958. Cuba, the world's leading exporter of sugar in 1958, has been reduced to importing it.
It is to these maneuvers that the Cuban oligarchs are dedicated on this third anniversary of the popular 11-J protests: more repression, more insistence on statism and government centralism, and more international masking of their private businesses. They haven't learned the lesson.
This is the context and meaning of 11-J, an uprising that caught the attention of the entire world sparked by the country's disfunctional governance and an elite that, rather than learning lessons, is sticking to its bayonets, without undertaking the radical changes that the country needs and that can only generate freedom and well-being for Cuba.