DISINFO: Recent riots in Cuba were unconventional warfare
SUMMARY
The riots that shook several Cuban cities on 11 July were instigated by an intense media campaign, with prominence on social networks, and directed from the United States, as part of the unconventional warfare against the island. Despite having been presented to international public opinion as "peaceful" and "spontaneous" demonstrations, even as a "social outbreak", the events that occurred in Cuba on 11 July point, according to the evidence, to another chapter of an unconventional war. It is also known as "hybrid war", "colour revolutions", "fourth-generation war", "soft coup", as part of a template applied by Washington in several countries of Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Latin America. They follow the script established by the US in unconventional warfare manuals. Just to mention one of those manuals, it is enough to read the training handbook TC 18-01 of the US Special Operations Forces, published in November 2010 under the title ‘Unconventional Warfare’, which can shed a light on the stages that this subversive process takes against nations that do not obey the dictates of Washington.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative against popular protests, aiming to frame them as destabilisation attempts orchestrated from abroad.
There is no evidence of any external hand behind the mobilisation in Cuba in July 2021, which reached unprecedented participation for Cuban standards. The discontent of the Cuban population can be attributed to many factors, including tight control of most economic sectors and the growing depression caused by the coronavirus pandemic, which also caused an unprecedented health crisis. This also happened against a background of political contestation led by the so-called San Isidro Movement, made up of young, well-known intellectuals and artists, who can’t be easily labelled as directed or orchestrated from abroad, as the Cuban government has done with previous dissident expressions.
In this context, when protests organised in social media erupted almost simultaneously in two different locations of the island (San Antonio de los Baños, near Havana, and Palma Soriano, in the province of Santiago) on 11 July 2021, they quickly expanded throughout the country. Attempts to explain these mobilisations as the result of a foreign-orchestrated campaign in social media have been debunked in some cases as false and preposterous, as is the case of this video shown in Cuban television in which a doctor claims to have received several SMS from the US calling him to protest. As researchers pointed, the screen shows that the message was sent on 16 July 2021, five days after the protests, and from a number from Canada, not the US.
Contrary to the claim, the TC 18-01 Unconventional Warfare handbook of the US Special Operations Forces is not a template for destabilisation through massive mobilisations, but a manual to establish or support resistance movements around a guerrilla force (see page 6), which is clearly not the case here, nor in many other situations depicted by pro-Kremlin disinformation as “unconventional and hybrid warfare” or “colour revolutions” when they are actually popular protests.
See other examples in our database, such as claims that the US has extended its influence in Russia and former Warsaw Pact countries by orchestrating colour revolutions, that the West organised a coup in Belarus in the name of democracy, that Poland-based “undesirable” Russian NGOs organise courses on mass riots and drug use, that there is a Western media campaign against Nicaragua, or that the US is funding a colour revolution in Mexico.