 On Sunday, July 11, thousands of Cubans and dozens of cities around the island nation took to the streets to protest the country's communist dictatorship and persistent shortages in food, energy and medicine, all of which have been made worse by the pandemic. The demonstrations have been enabled by social media and the internet, which only came to Cuba in a big way in late 2018, when President Miguel Díaz Canal allowed citizens access to data plans on their cell phones. To better understand exactly how Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and other social media platforms are connecting and empowering the Cuban people and undermining state control, Reason spoke with Ted Henkin, a sociologist at Baruch College and the co-editor of the collection Cuba's Digital Revolution. Ted Henkin, thanks for talking to Reason. And the first question I'm going to ask is, how is the internet enabling what's going on in Cuba? Yeah, okay. I think it's important to start with what's not happening. And that is important because we tend to read foreign developments as they relate to the internet shallowly. And examples of that happened a lot with the Arab Spring and calling those things Twitter or Facebook revolutions. And I think what's important to understand in that sense in general and then Cuba specifically is that the internet is acting as a facilitator of interests and groups and protests and discontent that traditionally were silenced and didn't have any place or a channel where they could really express themselves. So they're not internet revolutions. I think it's important to call those internet enabled uprisings or protest movements. There's an old concept called the dictator's dilemma which is any technology that may enter an authoritarian system as a double-edged sword and could help the dictator rule, maybe legitimize the dictator or the authoritarian leader because of education or development or any kind of other things that this technology in this case the internet enables. But it's a double-edged sword in that it can be used for a lot of other means by other actors. And this is certainly the case in Cuba. And so that dictator's dilemma, although sometimes it was read from a perspective of technological determination. Whenever internet enters a society game over and while Gonim, the former Facebook executive who was Egyptian, regretted his overly rosy idea that you add internet and the regime is over. And he learned the hard way that yes, the internet and social media is useful and helpful to undermine monopoly control of media communications and other aspects that are fundamentally important for totalitarian systems, whether of the right or the left. But they don't declare a winner. They change the game in important ways. Can you take a step back and explain why? How did the internet come to Cuba? You've written about how in December 2018, basically data plans were allowed for phone service or 3G mobile. Why did that happen? Well, that's a head scratcher because and it goes back to the dictator's dilemma. I mean, before that, you basically have a period in the 90s when Cuba was actually pretty advanced in the region in Latin America and the Caribbean in terms of its networking and internet and that kind of thing. But Fidel and the leaders at that time realized that this could be a, they called it a wild cult that needed to be tamed. And they saw it as a mortal threat because it undermined monopoly information control, which is one of the fundamental hallmarks of the Cuban system. The mass media is propaganda in Cuba. There's no two ways about it. And almost everyone right or left who understands and studies Cuba would grant that. And so the internet, in that sense, has a revolutionary or you could say a counter-revolutionary potential. But because of underdevelopment, because of priorities and because of that fear, and you could even add because of the U.S. embargo, isolating and cutting Cuba off from these kinds of communication influences, technologies, because it was part of the overall embargo, Cuba isolated itself and was isolated. That gradually ended when Raul Castro became president in 2008 and gradually thereafter, Cuban started getting gradually, but very gradually online. They started getting cell phones. They started being able to buy and use laptop computers. And so internet then grew from about 3 percent connectivity in about 2008 to around 2015 or so, you went up to about 15 or 20 percent. And that was enabled partly by the government rollout of first these very few internet cafes and then they kind of grew across the island to about 1,000 of them. Then the next big thing was that Cubans got what are called Wi-Fi hotspots. And these were set up largely in public parks throughout the island. And that was the kind of main way, the pioneering way that Cubans got online between about 2015 and 2018. Together with that, Cubans could contract to get home internet access. And all of these were kind of ways that Cubans were getting online gradually. During this period was the heyday of the blogosphere in Cuba and many independent voices established themselves, became even well known outside of Cuba, not so much inside of Cuba by being bloggers. Joani Sanchez is the most well known, but there was a whole community and she was the tip of that iceberg. But because internet connectivity grew and because the usefulness of a blog is largely about airing an opinion or an analysis, but not really communicating reliable information, Cuba is awash in opinions and Cubans are really good at airing them even with or within their system. But what they don't have is access to reliable information, what they have is access to government propaganda, partisan propaganda from the Communist Party. And so what they really needed was reliable journalism, the facts, reporting information. And so starting around 2014 up until today, you've seen the new kind of wave was independent digital journalism, media, startups, basically digital newspapers and magazines. And that was fascinating because the bloggers were largely self taught and opinionators, pundits and very many of them, the leading ones, were often very critical voices because that was what was missing. But many of the people who founded these independent websites and newspapers were actually trained as journalists in Cuba at Cuban universities, did their social service with their teeth clenched tightly, survived that one or two year commitment they had to give back to the system. And then they never wanted to work with the official media again and started independent startups, but they didn't want to become dissidents. But of course, they were targeted because they started independent websites as enemies and interrogated and detained and defamed. And so all of this was the kind of the ground work that was laid. And then in December of 2018, the government opened up the possibility for people to get mobile internet. Why did they do that? Well, I think they did that for two main reasons. Number one, there was an accumulated demand that the whole world has internet. And we're supposedly in a computerization of society program, the government has a policy they call the informatizacion de la sociedad, which is somewhat of a joke. But it is true that access has grown, prices have dropped, and the ways and means of access have grown. But Cuba is still a far cry from most of its neighbors and especially places like either China or the United States in terms of access. However, that became a before and after moment because it allowed access to the internet to become now and anywhere anytime real time phenomenon and not something that was restricted to a limited amount of time in a public park under the hot sun. And you could only really do text or maybe film yourself talking, but you couldn't show people what was happening in real time. And as we saw on Sunday, that's a key distinction because what really sparked the spread of this protest across the island was people filming live on Facebook and broadcasting that and then other people in Cuba seeing those things broadcast in the next town over did it themselves. So why did the government do that because of accumulated pressure and demand? But the other reason that did it, Cuba is in constant economic crisis, right? It's inefficient, it's unproductive. The system is totally lacking in incentive structures. The private sector is 1,001 obstacles in its way. And so the government sees the internet access as a cash cow because it is the sole internet provider through its telecom monopoly, Nauta, at Texas, the system, the company and Nauta is the particular service where you get mobile data. But it was a Pandora's box that they were opening because it's become political headaches. Probably now they can look back and say, have outweighed the economic whenfall. And you've written your Twitter feed is filled with these images from cell phones. The demonstrations are vast, right? I mean, they're not just happening in Havana or a couple of cities. They're all over the place. Yeah, this is what's unprecedented about them is that even if one of these had happened, it would be quite surprising in Cuba. But the fact that they happened simultaneously and probably between 30 and 50 places around the country. What are the what are besides Facebook live or kind of a video that's being shown via phone or Facebook? What are what are the other apps? Like what are the what are the ways in which people are using the internet to either protest or represent and share images of protest? Yeah, well, I guess you could say you can kind of break the apps that Cubans use in terms of what we're talking about into two groups, ones that allow horizontal encrypted private communication and others that are broadcast media, right? So Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are the go to apps to broadcast or to share with the world or with the wide public what's going on, including a live broadcast in Cuba. They even have a word they've been kind of invented for Facebook live. They don't call it Facebook live. They call it una directa because it's a transmisión directa al público, right? It's a direct transmission to the public whoever's watching and and people who might be well known because they do these things you know might announce you know five minutes I'm going to be doing a directa stay tuned and then they're out in the street talking to people or showing some abuse by the police or whatever. A fourth channel is of course YouTube, right? And there's a whole group of Cuban influencers and YouTubers and actually interestingly enough President Diaz Cannell angrily gave YouTube an endorsement on Sunday when he blamed this on these irresponsible mercenary YouTubers and influencers. It was almost laughable that he was he was blaming this on on YouTubers and influencers, right? But but that that shows really that this is broken through and maybe that's pretty gutsy though. I mean if you're doing something from Facebook or YouTube you are totally public. I mean the government knows exactly who you are and they can kind of trace you down. Well exactly and so that's been a change over the last let's say 15 years is that and this is one of the things they were chanting in the street on Sunday. We're not afraid. No tenemos miedo and this is a key part of the control in Cuba is keeping people afraid, keeping them isolated from one another and not realizing that other people share their concerns or their complaints and keeping them afraid of sticking their head up and getting it chopped off. And the internet has helped mitigate both of those because they see other people who share their concerns and then that helps them lose their fear. But there's always been in Cuban history the last 62 years under the revolution people who are brave enough to do that and those people have grown especially over the generations and and so there's a lot of people who are out of the political closet so to speak in Cuba who say the same thing in public as that they would say in private. But there's a long tradition in Cuba of what they call a doble moral or a duplicitousness that you practice strategically for survival because only among your family and friends are you going to trusted ones are you going to be critical because there's a whole network of what they call kivatos or spies of people title tales who will report back and many people who are interrogated the first time they're offered that deal like okay you can keep doing this but you have to report back to us you have to work for us right. I know I've interviewed a number of independent journalists in Cuba who had exactly that speech right. What are the what are the private or the encrypted apps or the peer-to-peer apps? I mean a signal or other types of communication systems at work here as well. There's four or five or six of them but four that I'll mention here because they seem to be the ones that people trust the most and have gone to the most. I think what started as kind of an evolutionary process people because they were on Facebook first and because everyone they knew was on Facebook it was easy to use Facebook Messenger because you're like already on Facebook use that little lightning bolt and you go and you use the private message the direct message the DM you DM somebody but people realized and learned the hard way maybe was that that's not encrypted and that can easily be hacked or if if someone gets interrogated and someone gets a hold of your account you know that stuff can get out so they migrated from Facebook Messenger to WhatsApp and WhatsApp is used in a thousand inventive ways I mean we might see WhatsApp because we have other options as mainly this or that you know we use it in the United States or in the West for these reasons but in Cuba they use it for a cornucopia of different things a lot of the independent startup media sites use it as a way to broadcast their information put a daily digest with links on WhatsApp then WhatsApp even though it's encrypted was questioned because it wasn't encrypted enough and so people then started migrating to telegram and to signal there's even a couple of apps that are Cuban engineered or Cuban developed that are that are for that kind of thing but because they're designed and in some sense approved by the Cuban government people don't trust them for real private communication so that that's the kind of situation there now after December and 2018 things heated up because you had all of this you know prologue and context and then suddenly people had access to horizontal real-time communication through mobile internet and so in the two and a half years since then culminating in Sunday's protests you had this non-stop drumbeat of every month or two you would have some major mobilization that was kind of a hashtag social media enabled internet enabled protests mobilization call to people to do things starting with a tornado that hit Havana in January of 2019 there was also this campaign on social media to get people to vote against the Constitution or to abstain from voting on it there was a an LGBT the kind of official LGBT march that was scheduled was canceled the last minute without any clear reason so people organized an independent one online and then it they went into the street and marched and then they were repressed that was actually very similar to what we saw on Sunday except it was just in one street in Havana but if people marched through and it wasn't political it was about LGBT but it was independent and so they shut it down and they dragged people off and and all of that led to the November of 2020 sit in outside the Ministry of Culture in response to a government raid of a hunger strike that was happening on the 26th of November on the 27th a bunch of mainstream mostly young artists and intellectuals literally crowded and sat down outside the Ministry of Culture demanding answers from the government about repression of people for either free speech or artistic freedoms and really the right to have rights in and of themselves that gave birth to a kind of new dynamic because it was really an unprecedented taking of public space and as we learned again on Sunday when Diaz Canal spoke La calle es de los revolucionarios the street belongs to the revolutionaries that is an old saying public space is understood to be revolutionary space and it can't be used in ways that are critical or counter to the revolution at least that's the you know that's the that's the rule unwritten but certainly spoken and reminded that they also say la revolu la universidad es de los revolucionarios the university is for revolutionaries and that began to be challenged the street wasn't for the revolutionaries only there's people in Cuba who are either non or counter-revolutionary and then the final thing I think that was really important is this thing called Movimiento San Isidro this is part of what we saw in November a group of artists mostly marginalized artists from humble backgrounds and poor neighborhoods in old Havana they they had not been doing political art street art for a few years again protesting against some new legislation that was rigidly controlling of the independent artist sphere in Cuba and you know they had kind of been a kind of a sideshow in terms of media attention in terms of government repression but because their hunger strike was cracked down on it was filmed on the cell phone it was shared and spread across Cuba that led to this 500 people or so to turn up and sit in at the media ministry of culture so that movement has continued to be a kind of sort and that neighborhood a source of protest and because that's a poor mostly Afro-Cuba neighborhood it it really stings the government because it a part of its legitimacy comes from the claim that it has been in favor of and supporting the the the least of these the the marginalized that traditionally discriminated against but those people in that movement together with some Afro-Cuban musical artists and celebrities who live now mostly in Miami all or all of whom are are Afro-descendant they just they decided to record a music video called Patria y Vida and this was in late January earlier February and that just became a viral you heard all over the island and that's what the other that's the other main chant that people had when they were out in the street Patria y Vida yeah homeland very homeland and life right right fatherland or homeland and life right that is a retort directly if you're Cuban you get it automatically because Fidel Castro used to end all of his speeches with this boilerplate declaration he would say fatherland or death we shall overcome right we will be victorious but uh patria o muerte so you got a choice between homeland or death or you have to give your life for the homeland you know you can interpret it different ways uh venceremos and so this was saying that essentially that government line is divisive it it basically turns us into revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries Cubans and traitors and we need to unify uh and we need to celebrate life and not like promised death if we're not like in line um and the video became extremely popular there were a number of other protests that happened uh in you know march april may where people sang that song were chanted that chant but they were localized in old Havana um and i think it took scarcity of medicine scarcity of food and a spike in covid cases and deaths in the last let's say month in Cuba for it to turn into what we saw on sunday how do these um protests compare to the protests uh in 1994 in Cuba which are seemed to be the reference point that um people are comparing to well i would say that in most aspects these are very different protests um it's the reference point because there has been very few public protests um in cuban history under the revolution this has been a very rare occurrence um and um and those protests are different i mean so in that sense they're similar right they're kind of a breakthrough moment of protest um but the government got very quickly control of those they were localized to uh one part of Havana uh um they only they let them last very long and they were um largely the result of the misery that Cuba was going through after the fall of the soviet union when you know exports and imports and food and fuel everything dried up and people were getting on rafts and leaving the country if it out Castro himself actually went out into the street and helped to quell the protests right um but they were you know poor marginalized mostly male probably a good portion afro cuban people who were protesting but but maybe more rioting breaking things right it was it was more of a frustration this this protest is different it seems to me in that it is pointedly political and anti it's not just breaking things it is demanding freedom it is um saying we are not afraid the other big big difference of course is that this is happening in 30 to 50 locations cities and towns all over the island and then the final difference which is probably the key one is that this is happening in the digital age right and this is happening when people have in their pockets in their hands cell phones and the cell phone is a real game changer in terms of how these dynamics work because they allow I mean you would look at any of those pictures and two-thirds of the people are filming are holding up cell phones um and you're obviously seeing it because someone is filming it and and you're seeing it because someone had a cell phone um so you don't have to rely on the cuban media which is totally unreliable you don't have to rely on the foreign media the foreign correspondents because they're often muzzled controlled or all can only say so much or they'll be sent packing very soon these are citizens or independent journalists who are filming and um and so that's why for the past two days that we've you know since the since sunday the government dropped the internet because they know that that that um that helped spread the discontent and and and the and the virus of protest is seeing other people protest or seeing them get it clubbed in the head right one of the uh you know hallmarks of kind of contemporary you know internet age protests is that they're distributed you know people have cell phones people upload footage images etc um in the arab spring you know a decade or so ago we saw similar images and similar activity it didn't really come too much in terms of transformative change in the country's most affected by it what do you think what are the lessons from the arab spring uh that might end up kind of shedding light on what's going on in cuba and where it's going to end up well i would do names come to mind or three names come to mind of people who have uh experienced and then written about this in i think smart ways the first is a guy named everyone knows is malcolm gladwell he had a new yorker article of about a decade ago was commenting on this and he was kind of poo pooing the the twitter revolution because he argued based on research that has been done this is based on weak ties it's very good at mobilizing people but it's very bad at capitalizing on that mobilization because those people have very little invested and very little authority or structure or organization to turn discontent even protest in the streets into something that could potentially replace or challenge a government so uh uh also why go name um the egyptian facebook executive who started that the facebook group that you know helped bring down the egyptian government he was very um let's say optimistic that you just need an internet right and that will help you change things and get rid of authoritarian leaders but later on he has this ted talk where he basically says i was wrong because you know as we've learned in the west in recent years right fake news amateurism can't can't replace journalism right meaning that you don't know if it's on the internet if it's true the government then knows that so it floods the internet with unbearable claims um so everybody can play that game and it doesn't get you anywhere also uh short messages on facebook or twitter tend to not leave room for reflection uh thought there's more like i got you um i think there's a distinction between calling someone out and calling them in right calling them out is kind of exposing them publicly to shame which doesn't really help build consensus or learn lessons or move together forward it's just embarrassing or humiliating somebody calling them in would be you know reaching out to them in private and saying hey you know i disagree with you for these reasons let's have coffee and talk right uh but it's more of a gotcha game and so he learned the hard way that the internet is really good at certain things that can help undermine or tear down things but it's not good at building things because it's a distributed network without a central authority structure and and glad well actually compared that to the civil rights movement and in greensboro back in the 50s and 60s where you had this structure that was born either out of the black church in the south or out of the historically black colleges and universities and those that's where the backbone of people who were willing to those were strong ties right so that distinction is important a final person is a sociology professor in the u.s. she's of Turkish origin her name is I say Zainab Tufeki is probably saying it wrong but but she's a brilliant public intellectual and has a whole book called the twitter and tear gas about this dynamic and and she certainly recognizes the power of the internet but she also talks about networked authoritarianism and how governments can play this game muddy the waters and they can easily make accessible information unusable because we don't know what to trust or believe and then of course they do have a master switch that they can turn on and what is the role I mean this was certainly the case in Egypt where it you know it was relatively you you know this I maybe not relatively easy but it was you know it was one thing to tear down a government or a secular government and a president but then the army really is calling a lot of the shots and in a country like Egypt and that also seems to be true in Cuba so that you have the government but then there's you know the guys with guns and tanks who are controlling things how do how do they fit into the equation of like what do we look for to see where this is heading in Cuba yes well I mean I think in that sense it's it's kind of it's a bleak situation because remember Raul Castro Fidel Castro his younger brother the former president of Cuba who just retired a few years ago from president and then retired a few months ago as the head of the communist party for his whole career he was the head of the armed forces he was the minister of armed forces he built the armed forces he put everybody who's in the armed forces in the places that they are the armed forces also controls the big parts of the Cuban economy a lot of the armed forces generals went to business school in the 90s through a program and and they were put in places to run different parts of the economy and so and so there's a lot that those people have in terms of power and a lot they have to lose if the regime changes economically especially right and so there's going to be I mean the police are seen by people generally and especially the secret police the state security system the ministry of the interior are seen as the bad guys but I think that the the power behind them are is the military but the military isn't traditionally seen as a bad or evil or repressive organization because they have mandatory military service for males in Cuba and so people have a familiarity with it as something normal whereas they see police and especially the state security as the kind of henchmen of repression but I don't know how true that is an actual fact it's just a good cop bad cop maybe routine and and so the other thing is that even though Raul Castro is old and officially retired and has no official portfolio he certainly has moral authority among the people who are in power including the president but also everyone else behind and beneath and around the president and you have you know how you and you have the government you have the military you have the ministry of the interior but then you also have the party but but but traditionally Fidel was really in control of all those organizations and then that was passed to Raul one thing to watch however of course is that when popular discontent overflows and expresses itself and these popular protests and street marches and etc what does the middle class do in terms of which side does it join people who or might be celebrities or people who have something to lose but also maybe a lot to gain for a change but then what elements within the governing structure might get peeled off or split inside with the protesters in one way or another or will they just obey orders and so that question is too early to ask or even answer but it's something that I think we would be watching for in the days and weeks to come what you know everyone in the United States if you're on the left if you're on the right if you're libertarian whatever you know people are going to project onto Cuba you know their ideology so you know how how do we disentangle that it is I mean is this fundamentally it's a Cuban phenomenon right and is it going to mostly be resolved you know within Cuba or what are the you know if this was happening pre-91 it would you know there would be a superpower overlay on all of this but you know how do we disentangle you know American ideology from what's actually going on yeah well I mean yeah I think that yeah it is hard to see Cuba because all of us have blinders or lenses or tinted glasses depending on what we see I have a friend in Cuba who would host delegations he's a he's a journalist there and he would often host delegations and he said whenever they had people from the third world developing world they would always ask about healthcare and education and whenever they had people from Europe of the United States they would always ask about you know human rights and democracy right and so that's certainly true the United States Cubans I mean Americans you know on on on the left they tend to do the same thing as people in the third world and on the right the same thing is you you know but I think there's also a projection and Cuba is really good at playing this role at seeing Cuba as a David and the United States as a Goliath and read having everything through the embargo and the U.S. imperial relation and if you're a student of Cuban history you certainly there's certainly reason for that frame but the problem is that many people stop reading Cuban history after 1959 or I only read it up to 59 because after that time gradually and then definitely by you know by the mid 60s or late 60s you know there's a Goliath of the Cuban government and the David of the Cuban people right and so it's important to see that Cuba is not one thing it's many things right and there's certainly a divide between state and society right where the state of course claims to legitimately represent and serve the people but that's not true in any country but it's especially not true in a country that lacks a whole range of fundamental freedoms and civic civil liberties right um and just because they have access to these other things like healthcare and education for free and for a time it was even quality for free but not anymore really um that doesn't make it okay then to not have the other freedoms right um so I think what's the most important and this is hard for Americans to do or many any outsider to do is to try to tune into the various different perspectives that are coming from within Cuba that are let's say unfiltered by propaganda right I mean everyone has different opinions or takes but if you have a system or a party that is editing or censoring or turning what you do or say into propaganda then it's really hard to hear voices so I try because you know I you know half my life is lived in Spanish I try to listen very intently to the nuances that Cubans themselves are sharing and reporting but it's hard for Americans to do that because we get an American English version and it's often watered down and it's just maybe a headline or breaking news I think that my my my I guess my advice would be this when people present Cuba as one or the other I say it's both and right when people present it as this revolutionary society that stood up to Uncle Sam and successfully resisted globalization and imperialism and capitalism I say yes and when people you know but it's also these other things that you could find in George Orwell animal farm I mean I reread animal farm recently and I was like I could have read this 20 years ago and I would have understood Cuba not totally true but all of this stuff that's an animal farm exists in Cuba even though they also stood up against a you know a Goliath an imperial power that that that was ignorant and arrogant and its policy and continues to be so largely especially under Trump but but even you know remnants of that under Obama and Biden but at the same time that shouldn't silence us or cause us to bite our tongue when it's very clear that people are out in the street chanting liberty right give me liberty or give me death I mean they're saying give me liberty and give me life right and we're not afraid and there's certainly not complaining about the US embargo they probably did that last week at a government sponsored protest so I think that it's it's it's it's hard but very important to keep two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time and even see them not as contradictory they both can be true at the same time right is there anything that the United States which obviously has a long and generally awful relationship with Cuba in terms of you know trying to dictate terms to that country you know is there anything that the US can be doing that would help facilitate a you know a flourishing of actual kind of civil society and freedom within Cuba or is it something where you know whatever whatever we do is going to end up making the situation worse as I said before the first thing we can do is realize we have you know the the future of Cuba is not going to be decided in Washington or even Miami it's going to be decided in Cuba however um I think that most of the moves that Obama made were move moves that are born out by logic reason and history the things that we tried in various ways over 50 years didn't work they didn't liberate Cuba if anything it gave the government a convenient excuse to goliath to blame its problems on um and and that's not even to talk about the you know ethical or human rights issues of the kind of embargo we had I'm not completely against you know sanctions or embargoes but they need to be targeted they need to be focused there I'd be clearly not effective if the idea was to destabilize the the Castro regime you know a complete failure right so what Obama did I thought was to continue to rhetorically celebrate and stand up for a classic liberal freedoms rights um and and he did that not just in an op-ed or in a White House briefing he went to Havana and he gave a speech to the president and people of Cuba and he said those things explicitly unapologetically respectfully he also recognized other things that were um the cubas could be proud of that cubas had in common right and then they said in motion a bunch of policies and uh that we're trying to find common ground to try to get at least pick the low low hanging fruit before they could get to the bigger issues that maybe Obama didn't have control over like the embargo like Guantanamo Able base in Cuba like democracy and human rights and freedom of speech and such so I think that a return to that policy is wise uh strategic slow maybe um right now I think the most pressing thing is humanitarian assistance humanitarian aid because of the food shortage the medicine shortage and the spike in covid cases those are all important and I think priorities right now other policies that would be uh you know returning to some kind of thaw or re-engagement um should come later I think in general we should eliminate the embargo um I mean the details about how to do that when to do that how much at first or later is important but I think Obama had the goal if he was in his power he would have gotten into the embargo um none of this is going to bring freedom to Cuba but I think it will remove the United States as a convenient scapegoat it will allow greater people to people contacts uh economic engagement that could you know at least turn Cuba into a China if not a free country right so that there's some more freedom economic freedoms there's more prosperity you know I mean many people in Cuba you know there's a quote I heard that was really good it was like we were so we were so hungry in Cuba that we ate our fear right uh and that they didn't have any more fear so they went out into the streets right and I think that uh that desperation is what's happening in Cuba and that's partly the design of of the embargo right to make people desperate so they rise up so in someone someone certainly smiling who supports the embargo right now because they're saying finally it's working and thanks to Trump right um but I think the price of that is far too high in humanitarian terms to claim it as a victory um and also it's not not clear that that's going to change anything either so do you think the Biden administration will um you know have the type of policy that you hope uh the US would take towards Cuba yes I think it's certainly uh in the wheelhouse of the Biden administration they're reviewing that policy but they're going slow I think for three reasons they're going slow first of all because there's a lot of other priorities huge priorities starting with COVID starting with repairing the carnage left by by Trump the American carnage left by the Trump administration um and at least from the perspective of the Democrats right um so that's number one number two is that the Cuban government instead of reaching across and shaking Obama's hand they rhetorically after he left in that state visit in 2016 they attacked his intentions as being you know wolf and sheep's clothing they uh circled the wagons and and and uh tightened the restrictions they increased repression so in the short term the the Obama um open hand scared them more than the bush or other presidents closed fist because they're used to having an enemy and they reacted and actually didn't take advantage of this golden historic opportunity to not just normalize relations with the U.S. but take that as an opportunity to change some necessary things within Cuba even within the structure of the system or the revolution so that then led a lot of people in South Florida to say that was a great gesture that was a great trial Obama but it didn't work Trump all the way right and that leads me to the third issue which is South Florida and presidential elections right the reason that Biden not moving quickly on this is that the the Democrats lost Florida and they lost it by a lot relative in relative terms and it's it's it's it seems very likely based on exit polling and other kind of surveys that that the Cubans and other Latinos in South Florida who are refugees from repressive leftist countries in Latin America were part of that swing away away from the Democrats there's probably a lot of Latinos and Cubans who voted for Obama and then voted for Trump twice right when he won and then when he lost the country but won Florida and and that's also for the congressional elections not just the next presidential election final question where do you think will be or where do you think Cuba will be in you know six months time well the well the protests have been swept away will be the well they have achieved some kind of goal or will they just be ongoing I am not hopeful that things will change for the better rapidly in Cuba this protest is certainly hopeful in the sense that a massive swath of people who had bitten their tongue and were silent and fearful did take to the streets and that's a that's a clear warning to the government that it needs to move faster to respond and unfortunately the government at least in the short term is blaming everything on the US and calling most of the people you know scum or traders or mercenaries but they also know that this is the most serious threat that they've ever seen in 62 years and unless they respond to the fundamental issues that are driving it this these protests are going to maybe go underground be quelled for today and tomorrow but but come back up a month from now two weeks from now some other spark if they don't get a hold of covid if they don't get a get their economic house in order and eliminate some of the scarcities but now that's going to happen quickly the government doesn't move quickly and it doesn't change these policies and it's been getting advice after advice after advice from within the country about these things and it moves extremely slowly the real question for me is the Cuban people after this taste of a day of street marches and shouting in the street and losing their fear are they going to go back and wait again for something to happen or are they going to push the issue I mean when we had a few years ago in Iran a similar like massive protests but they ended up being either crushed or you know the government outweighed them request them and then nothing fundamental changed right so at this point it was certainly refreshing I mean I have Cuban-American friends who didn't leave Cuba that long ago who spent the last two days crying from shock and happiness and concern and relief because in their whole lives they never thought they would see the day I mean these kind of things are common in little Havana in Miami but they're unheard of largely in Cuba itself and to see it happen so many places so many people is breathtaking and so it's certainly something to watch but I can't foresee how in six months things will be fundamentally different but I certainly hope they're moving in that direction all right we're going to leave it there Ted Henkin thanks for talking to reason my pleasure thanks for having me take care and we'll keep our eyes on Cuba