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The Republican Congressman Carlos A. Giménez published a message on X (Twitter) this Thursday with the hashtag #SOSCuba to express his support for the young Cubans who have taken to the streets to demand their rights on the island. “ALL OUR SUPPORT FOR THE BRAVE YOUNG PEOPLE DEMANDING THEIR RIGHTS IN CUBA!”, the legislator wrote, whose post garnered over 1,300 likes and 285 retweets.
The message comes days after between 20 and 30 students staged a peaceful sit-in on the steps of the University of Havana to protest prolonged blackouts and unsustainable academic conditions. The protest, organized through social media, began at 10:00 AM with a single young person sitting on the first step and grew over nearly two hours in the presence of State Security agents.
The magnitude of the discontent compelled the First Deputy Minister of Higher Education, Modesto Ricardo Gómez, as well as the rector Miriam Nicado García and the minister Walter Baluja, to intervene. The students directly confronted them, stating: “You haven't listened to us from the very beginning.” One of the protesters challenged a dean with a question that encapsulated the widespread frustration: “How many hours of electricity did you have last week? And do you have connectivity when they cut off the power?”
The student unrest also spread to CUJAE and UCI, and in the streets of Havana, people protested with pots and pans, chanting “Down with communism!”. The regime, for its part, filled a nearby park with children to block a meeting about university reforms called by the students themselves.
The trigger for the protests was the severe energy crisis that worsened on March 5, when a breakdown at the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric power plant left two-thirds of Cuba without electricity, affecting more than six million people. Authorities suspended classes for 300,000 students in Havana. By Tuesday, the capital was experiencing outages of up to 21 hours a day, with a projected deficit of nearly 1,900 MW.
Giménez, born in Havana in 1954 and emigrated to the United States in 1960, is the only member of Congress born in Cuba. He has been ramping up his pressure against the regime in line with the Trump administration's policy. Last Saturday, at an event prior to the Shield of the Americas summit in Doral, he stated: "The days of the regime are numbered, and I'm not talking about years, but about days." In February, he urged airlines like American Airlines to suspend flights to Cuba and wrote in Fox News that the island is experiencing its "Berlin Wall moment."
The students who led the sit-in described their action as a last resort. “We are not martyrs of any side; we are university students. Therefore, none of us intended to be here, but there has been no other option,” declared one of the protesters, according to El Toque. Youth discontent had been brewing for some time: in February, students from the Instituto Superior de Arte had already raised their voices with slogans such as “I AM FREE” and “Is this what you call a revolution?”.
In recent months, several young Cubans who openly criticize the regime have reported facing pressure, discrediting campaigns, and harassment by State Security. Members of the project Fuera de la Caja, a collective of young people that publishes analyses and commentary on the political and social situation in Cuba, reported that State Security agents visited their homes to intimidate them due to their critical content. Days later, the group responded publicly to the offensive from the official apparatus and defended their right to express their opinions and dissent after being attacked by the official program Con Filo.
Also, the influencer and activist Anna Bensi, one of the most visible young voices against the regime on social media, has reported campaigns of phone harassment, surveillance, and pressures that even affected her work after she publicly expressed her criticisms of the Cuban political system. The young woman once again found herself at the center of the debate with a strong critique of the regime in a viral video, after her case had already garnered attention from international media for the harassment she reports suffering.
Other young people have also faced reprisals for expressing their ideas. At the beginning of February, CiberCuba reported the detention of members of the El4tico project and the atmosphere of intimidation surrounding their case, while activists and content creators insisted that having different thoughts cannot become a crime amid new allegations of repression and harassment.
For many activists, these episodes reflect an increasingly visible pattern: a new generation of Cubans is using the internet and social media to expose the reality of the country while facing surveillance, interrogations, threats, and other forms of pressure from State Security.
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