 All right, so welcome to WTF is going on in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Code Pink Latin America teams weekly webinar on important regional news that doesn't get covered in corporate media. My name is Leonardo Flores and I'm filling in for my friend and colleague Terry Maxson who normally hosts the show every Wednesday night at 730pm Eastern tonight is a special episode given what's been going on in Cuba. Over the past week and really what's been going on in the US in response to that, and I'm joined by read Lindsay a documentary filmmaker and journalist with 20 years of experience reporting investigating writing producing directing and mentoring around the world. He's the founder and currently the director of belly, belly of the beast and award winning innovative new media organization that covers Cuba and Cuba US relations. Welcome to the program read it's really a pleasure to have you here with us. Thanks for having me. Can you tell us a little bit about about belly of the beast and the documentary that you all made the war in Cuba. The beast is, it's a media organization that that that we started about a year ago, and is independent. And we are funded by donations through nonprofit fiscal sponsor, and we focus on coverage of Cuba and US Cuba relations. And we are a collaborative project with the journalists like myself in the United States and Cuban journalists and filmmakers, and we mainly focus on a video. Our aim is to reach a young audience United States, and we try to do so with very high quality production video, combined with substantive journalism. I try to counter mainstream narratives the United States and tell stories in Cuba that are not being told the US audience. And I really want to, I'm going to play a clip right now from a video that you just made in response to the July or about rather the July 11 protests. So bear with me while I screen my shirt, my screen for a second. Thousands took the streets this Sunday in the biggest protest Cuba has seen in decades. The chance focused on civil liberties and the political system, but scarcities were the biggest factor fuel in the demonstrations. Why did so many people leave the streets? US sanctions intensified during the Trump administration triggered Cuba's economic crisis, but the protesters took their anger out on the Cuban government. The 60 year old US blockade against Cuba was created to deny money and supplies to Cuba to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government. The Trump administration expanded the economic war against Cuba, strangling the island with more than 200 sanctions, like an oil blockade and restricting remittances and flights. During the pandemic, these sanctions escalated, hindering Cuba's response to COVID. Rollout of Cuba's vaccine was delayed because US sanctions prevented raw materials from being imported, according to the Cuban government. Even now, as COVID cases in Cuba rise to their highest level since the pandemic began, Joe Biden has done nothing to lift the sanctions. His response to Sunday's events did not mention the embargo. The United States stands firmly with the people of Cuba as they assert their universal rights and we call on the government, the government of Cuba to refrain from violence or attempts to silence the voice of the people of Cuba. It is not a very hypocritical and cynical speech that you block me, that you take politics that violates the human rights of a whole people. During more than 60 years, the recruits in the midst of a situation as complex as the pandemic and you want to present yourself as the great Salvador, raise the blockade. In Miami, Cuban American hardliners have circulated a petition calling for a US intervention. If the intervention is something with the international community to provide these help or something military, all the options have to be on the table. Hundreds of government supporters took to the streets in response to the protest. In Havana, the government's response to protests was mixed. In the neighborhood of Regla, protesters marched for hours peacefully without a police response. In downtown Havana, encounters with the police were frequent and violent. Cuban musician Jomil tried to convince protesters to carry out a peaceful sit-in. But his appeal was ignored. Government security forces detained dozens, possibly hundreds of protesters. Protests ended Sunday night. The streets are calm for now. First of all, that's an excellent video. I think that answers quite a bit of questions for people who really have no idea what's been going on in Cuba over the last week. So congratulations on that. Can you tell us what the situation is on the ground right now? Well, the situation has been pretty calm in Havana, at least, since Sunday. On Monday, there was someone killed a 36-year-old man in Havana and it is unclear what happened. The state media reported on that and we haven't been able to independently sort of figure out exactly what happened there. And I think that we just, on state media, get a very one-sided account. So I would take that with a grain of salt, not knowing the circumstances. I think the most we can say is that a person was killed by the Cuban security forces. And it was on Monday, so it was the day after, when there were really demonstrations, it was a localized event. I'm not positive it was a demonstration, but it could have been. And that would have occurred in Havana. There were no deaths on Sunday. Since Monday, there really hasn't been anything, a lot of rumors. I think a lot of rumors emanating from the United States. I've had two anecdotes of people, a member of the Buddybees team and also a neighbor who heard through family members of family members in the United States that things were happening, like there was massive demonstration in the Malacone or tanks were coming from the U.S. and these type of things. And as it turns out, it wasn't true. Stuff on internet talking about how protesters had taken over the provinces, come away, turned out to be true. A lot of pictures of the on internet of the of Alexandria and Egypt after Mubarak fell saying that was the Malacone Havana. Lots of sort of fake news floating around, lots of rumors. But if you walk out in the streets, it's calm. I just actually an hour ago was told that there's something brewing in the Malacone. And, you know, we're, so we hear that, do we go? Is it probably just a rumor? How do we find out? The internet's been was cut. And it's been a little hard initially to figure out what was going on. But now it's, there isn't internet. We're speaking, I have Wi-Fi at my house. I'm a very privileged situation, obviously. Most people don't have Wi-Fi knowns, but VPNs are readily available. And with a VPN, you can get online and access WhatsApp and sell data now. And their Wi-Fi parks where you can access the internet as well. So it's not that difficult now to get connected. But yeah, a lot of fake news going around. And yeah, the question now is, will there be another sort of protest like there was on Sunday, which was on the scope of it when compared to protests in other parts of the world? Certainly, I've covered a lot of protests around the world, including the United States. And it was relatively small. But at least what I went to, I saw two protests independent of each other in Havana. One was about 300 people. The other was several thousand. But most of the city was calm. They were not enormous protests. But in Cuba, even a few hundred people protesting against the government is as hugely significant event because it is not normal. And I think it is a, as I think maybe the video, as the video hopefully shows, is a result of a lot of anger and frustration that people are feeling because the economic situation is so dire here. Can you go into that a bit more in terms of how people are feeling, the pinch economically? Yeah, it's not like Cuba was a booming economy five years ago, like when Obama was here and opening things up. Things started to improve, especially in Havana, in particular Havana, when Obama sort of opened relations. It wasn't a booming economy and people still were struggling to get by and very low salaries and so on, and lines to get stuff and whatnot. But when Trump took over, he intensified sanctions and things, and there was really, he had passed a barrage of sanctions, one after the next, and it made things more and more difficult. There was less, less and less, there were fewer tourists, which took a big hit. He basically did everything possible to carve Cuba's access to foreign currency and that affected everyone because it affected the government and affected the energy shortages. So let's say the guy who, the person owns a, in the war in Cuba, we interviewed a BC taxi driver whose clients weren't tourists, but the clients were Cubans who work in the tourist industry and they made some money and so now he's out of, he basically has no work anymore. So things of that nature, but things, and it was getting worse and worse, and even at that time that same BC taxi driver, remember telling us that things were getting worse than that special period. And it was before COVID and when COVID hit, it just, things went in a free fall here. And the biggest thing was the lines, just massive lines to get food, this food shortages essentially. And so people waiting in long lines to get food to get detergent, soap or cooking oil, whatever might be there. Sometimes things that were non-essential like cola or beer as well, but just lines and lines. That wasn't the case. We have to wait in line for seven hours to buy chicken. Maybe wait in line for 30 minutes. Or maybe not at all, but it got really bad with the lines. And recent months it's gotten really much worse. It's extended to products that will not normally be scarce like sugar, coffee, extremely scarce. And outside of food, the really tough thing now is medicine. You know, Cuba prides itself on free healthcare. It had a pretty remarkable care system. Again, before this economic crisis, it wasn't like medicine was abundant. You could go to the pharmacy and it was sort of hit or miss. You're going to find something. But they generally had a lot of the basics and you could, you know, it was pretty available. Medicine was, you could find what you wanted generally. But now, I mean, the most basic things are scarce, like the equivalent of aspirin, ibuprofen and basic antibiotics. All sorts of basic medicines are scarce. Cuba produces most of the medicine that it makes. It's done that because of the embargo, so that can be self-sufficient. So it produces like, I think, 70 or 80% of the medicine, at least the basics that are needed. But it needs to import the raw materials to make that medicine. And because of the intensification of sanctions, and I think probably also in part because of the just sort of general lack of foreign currency in the country, it's been harder and harder for Cuba to import those raw materials. And as a result, there is this shortage, which is pretty dire. At the same time, they have two of the top vaccines in the world in terms of efficacy, and they have been moving forward pretty rapidly with vaccination. I was, I've been vaccinated. I got my second vaccination just a week or so ago from what I've been told by the government. And it seems true. Everybody in Havana over the age of 19, nearly everybody has had at least one dose and the whole population of Havana will be vaccinated by the end of the month, which is pretty remarkable given the situation. One thing I keep, a mistake I keep hearing from the Biden administration, which is, it's not true. And also in the media is that Cuba is having, the people are on the streets because they're not getting vaccinated. That's just not true. I think part of the reason people are on the streets is because of medicine, the shortage of medicine, but it's not the shortage of vaccinations. And the protests were sparked in part by a lot of concern over the COVID crisis in Matanzas and other provinces. Things have really exploded there in recent months in terms of COVID cases. But that, I think was sort of a detonator, maybe, because it was a huge social media campaign. And it just, I think it may be for people who are very frustrated and angry about all sorts of other things, it maybe was the last straw type of thing. I'd like to get into that a bit, this SOS hashtag SOS Cuba campaign that we saw on Twitter, because it clearly starts almost a week before the protests on the 11th. And I don't know if you've seen, I know that Cuba's foreign ministry put out a statement about a report that they're doing on this. And there's also a report or rather a tweet thread by an independent analyst from Spain who does a lot of really great work on covering the use of bots, particularly when it relates to how they're used to attack left governments or left social movements throughout Latin America. And one of the things they found that, you know, first of all, one of the big accounts that was retweeting, something like, you know, they sent a thousand tweets between the 10th and the 11th, and they were retweeting the hashtag more than five times per second. And it was a guy linked to a foundation in Argentina that receives USAID and any money. Is there any kind of do you see any connection between between this SOS hashtag campaign and the protest that did one trigger the other. I think it's, well, I was going to say it's impossible to know I guess it is in theory it's possible. I'd be surprised if someone's able to really get to the bottom of that. I was in Regla at this neighborhood when the protests first started there and, and I walked around for a few hours and just observed and filmed the protest and tried to figure out who was leading it. You know, like, was there one leader or a couple people was it like a real engineer coordinated thing. It was pretty tough to tell. And there definitely were a few people who are more vocal than the rest, but it wasn't really clear that they were sort of driving it necessarily. I was asking myself that question, you know, because I had in the that day the day before are getting, you know, we're getting all these SOS Cuba stuff and like Mia Khalifa porn star was putting up opinions about it and everyone was like what's going on. It just was so bizarre, and people were getting upset about it and then about what was going on my chances that have been going on for a while. And it just sort of reached this further pitch online. And I, it seemed to coincide with the protests. I think though that it may be, and I do, you know, we were actually had an interview with a Spanish investigator today, which sort of which fell through but we hope to talk to him, and we're looking into that and it's very interesting and I think it's worth looking into. At the same time, I think it's sort of, it's not the main point. Because I feel like Cuba was a tinderbox. That may have been the match. But if it wasn't the match, they have been a different match. The point was that it was a tinderbox. And I think that that is the bigger story and the real story, because I know that there's like I myself and, oh, I spent a lot of my journalistic career looking into coups and, and, you know, sort of machinations by the CIA and, and I find it fascinating and outrageous sometimes and I know that. And so I, I will definitely it's something that I'm interested in looking at that. But I think the bigger story, and the more important story is that that Cuba, the things are really dire here. And people are angry and frustrated, they're taking out their anger on the government. And, and, and, and they're, and the government is to blame without doubt, like any government is for many problems in its country. And Diaz Canal, the president came out and said that, essentially, not, not, not what I just said, but he said that he did, he did, he said he actually put, and I haven't ever heard him speak so so in such a conciliatory way but he basically said that we haven't reached the vulnerable and areas and poor areas, disadvantaged areas he said, and people and the institutions haven't been sensitive enough to people's concerns and problems and so on. And, and yeah, yeah, there's a lot but it, but the US journalist in Cuba reporting for US audience. You know for me the bigger issue is, is US sanctions US policy because you just can't have the most powerful country in the world trying to strangle a small neighboring country economically doing everything in its power to just destroy its economy, and think that it has a minor impact, or to think it doesn't have any impact, which, unfortunately, a lot of people in Miami, I think, and, and people in Cuba, sadly. I mean, it's, I have, we've seen, it's hard, it's very difficult to see the embargo. And I think Liz, who works here at Belly Abyss is always talking about it. It's so hard to see it, you just don't, you know, the people can't see it whether they can see the government. They can see when some, you know, maybe the official is abusive or takes as a takes advantage of the power or is not responsive to their concerns or understanding, or they're just suffering like they don't have food and medicine. And we can't see the fact that, you know, that the government tried to buy some chemical and India and they went to make the financial transaction bank and Panama stock close their account and as a result the shipment was delayed by three months and that's why the sick person isn't getting their medicine. They don't see that. Nobody sees that even us as journalists and we're trying hard to get out that information we can't even get out at most the time. And that's the really hard thing, but, but I think that but that it's real. It's absolutely real. It has a tremendous impact. And, and really it's going to be really hard. It's going to be impossible in Cuba to ever really know what the Cuban government really is responsible for the problems they're responsible for the mistakes they're making. Until you get rid of the embargo because it's all mixed together. And, and, and, and so it's a really unfortunate fact that that the sanctions still exist. I found it outrageous as I am appalled by it. And I, and I feel like our, our elected officials should be ashamed of themselves. It is shameful. And Joe Biden, who was elected on a platform of changing policy towards Cuba was a prompt campaign promise he made should be ashamed of himself. It's his recent decision to not lift reminiscences. It was cowardly. It was 100% based on his political calculation of Florida, which I think is wrong, but whatever it's based on Florida politics. Yeah, it's, it's, it also, to me, one of the things that we've seen over the past four years since really the Trump administration came into office is that just prior to that we had all these polls and all these articles talking about the divide within the Cuban American community, particularly in Florida about the embargo about this idea of not having diplomatic relations and pull after pull showed that more and more people were opening to lifting the embargo to resuming this to normalizing relations. And then, you know, if you look at the polls now they clearly started diverging again in the opposite direction during the Trump years and there was very little pushback from any Democrat really. And so, so why do you think that is what why didn't the Democrats kind of capitalize on this enthusiasm on Obama did but why didn't that continue. Well, I'm not I'm probably not in the best position to answer that I have the same question because I haven't spent much time on Miami in fact I've been there in years, but I get the impression. You know, from afar that in Miami, you've got. It's almost like this whole this Trump phenomena, which I've also sort of witnessed from afar so I haven't been in the US for most of it, but, but this just radicalization of just insane radicalization of certain people in the United States and how they've they've turned into like they have these crazy ideas and they're living in these insane sort of fake news bubbles. And you see it I grew up in Idaho and see it in places like Idaho and Wyoming. You know where they think climate change is not real and I mean they have insane ideas. And so I feel like Miami is a little bubble of sort of fake news insanity. People get swept up in it and that's all they hear and that's all they believe. And, and, and it just sort of took over that's impression I get I mean, I heard yesterday I saw a report yesterday, I saw footage of pro Cuban American protesters in the mayor of Miami, and accusing him of being soft on Cuba, the mayor of Miami just called for military and then interventionary bombardment of Cuba. He's, he's soft, according to the people on the street. So you can see how the politicians are, you know, they don't, most politicians don't have any conviction, they're going to go whichever way is political convenient. So he's just he's trying to appease his base he's not even going far enough by calling it a bombardment. So you just imagine Biden sitting there saying look, I don't care about Cuba. He doesn't really care. Sure I'd like to have a relations, my wife Jill went down there she had a great time she told me all about it. I'd love to go back but you know what doesn't really help me politically could hurt me and Menendez is giving me a hard time in the Senate. And cheese they're you know they're all these these moderate moderate slash conservative Democrats in South Florida are telling me that it that they're they're getting attacked for being communists I better do something about it. You know, I don't know I'm making it up because I don't know, but I'm guessing that those type of things are happening. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Thanks so much for your time today read can you tell us lastly just how people can support the great work that belly of the beach is doing. I appreciate that well. Well, you know, check us out spread the word about our work belly of the beast Cuba calm is our website. We mainly do video again and we do social media posts we also try to write articles for other publications but we don't really have a lot of written we don't have our website outside of like short social media posts and graphics on our social media handles belly the beast. You, I think if you just the best way easiest way to belly the beast Cuba that comment you can find our social media and YouTube links there or just Google belly the beast Cuba and it should come up and the war and Cuba is on as in on YouTube got more than a half million views there. And if you go to our website there's a dog if you if you are in position to be able to donate any kind of donations to do to do what we do so that that's a way to help as well. Please do donate it's really incredible work that you are doing there and one of the I mean, pretty much the only independent kind of objective voice on Cuba that I've seen in English at least so I hope folks donate and also please go to code pink dot org slash and the blockade to join our call to press Biden on lifting the Trump sanctions on lifting the embargo and on normalizing relations with Cuba thanks so much again for your time read. Thank you I appreciate it. Thank you.