Shocking new footage shows Cuban authorities firing on protesters in the Caribbean nation — as the island’s president calls on Communist loyalists to confront the mobs.
“They’re firing at the protesters!” @sos_cuba posted in Spanish on Twitter, with a video of Cuban cops walking toward demonstrators as shots are heard in the background.
“This will not be forgotten, so they know,” @VpKCuba wrote in another tweet showing a similar scene from Sunday’s unrest.
Another clip shows Cuban police confronting another group of protesters en masse, with a caption chiding Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel for “declaring war on his own people.”
The unrest erupted over the weekend amid the socialist country’s worst financial crisis in decades, with hundreds of demonstrators seen marching and demanding freedom from the government.
Diaz-Canel quickly blamed the protests on the US, saying American propaganda fueled the outbursts, which he maintained were limited and isolated.
The president also called on loyalists to confront the protesters.
“This is why we are calling on all revolutionaries in our country, all Communists, to take to the streets in any of the places where these provocations take place today, from now on, through these days,” he told Granma, the official Communist Party newspaper.
The Biden administration expressed support for the demonstrators, while hundreds also took to the streets in Miami, home of the nation’s largest Cuban American population.
Meanwhile, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a socialist, responded to the protests by calling on the US to lift its decades-old economic embargo on Cuba.
“The truth is that if one wanted to help Cuba, the first thing that should be done is to suspend the blockade of Cuba as the majority of countries in the world are asking,” Lopez Obrador said at a news conference.
“That would be a truly humanitarian gesture,” he said. “No country in the world should be fenced in, blockaded.”
With Post wires