Cuba libre: why Cubans have reached breaking point

There is an astonishing patience in the Cuban people, born of endless waiting. When a store has, say, chicken, people queue, often for days. But on Monday, outside the Zanja police station in central Havana, people weren’t waiting for food. They were waiting — patiently — for news of family members who had been arrested during unprecedented protests at the weekend.

The demonstrations flared like a petrol fire. Cubans had settled down for lunch, many preparing to watch the Euro 2020 final, when news spread of a march in the town of San Antonio de los Baños on the outskirts of Havana. Videos on social media showed people, driven to fury by daily, hours-long power cuts, chanting ‘libertad’ — freedom — or else ‘Patria y Vida’ — fatherland and life (a play on the bellicose revolutionary slogan Patria o Muerte — fatherland or death).

By half-time at Wembley, 4 p.m. here, the game was interrupted — as all Cuban television was — to show the furious President, Miguel Díaz-Canel, calling on government supporters — ‘all the revolutionaries, all the communists’ — to take to the streets and protect the country against protestors who had by then emerged the length and breadth of the 1,250km island.

By international standards, the protests were mild. Cars were overturned; bricks (of which there is no shortage to hand in this crumbling city) were thrown; a policeman was reported injured. In recent years Moscow, London, Santiago de Chile, Bogota, New York, Minneapolis and Hong Kong have seen far worse. But the impact should not be underestimated. This sort of thing just doesn’t happen in Cuba. The island is safe through a curious and amorphous combination of authoritarian rule and strong communitarian instincts, the ratio of which can be endlessly argued over.