Source: The Grayzone | Click here for original article
Painting itself as a grassroots collective of artists fighting for freedom of expression, the San Isidro Movement has become a key weapon in the US government’s assault on the Cuban revolution.
“My people need Europe, my people need Europe to point out the abuser,” Yotuel, a Spain-based Cuban rapper, proclaimed in an EU parliament event convened by right-wing legislators before handing the mic over to Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó. Days later, Yotuel held a Zoom call with State Department officials to discuss “Patria y Vida,” the anti-communist rap anthem he helped author.
As the dust clears from a day of protests across Cuban cities, the Wall Street Journal has dubbed “Patria y Vida” the “common rallying cry” of opponents of Cuba’s government, while Rolling Stone touted it as “the anthem of Cuba’s protests.”
Besides Yotuel, two rappers who collaborated on the song are among a collection of artists, musicians and writers called the San Isidro Movement. This collective has been credited by US media with “providing a catalyst for the current unrest.”
Throughout the past three years, as economic conditions worsened under an escalating US economic war while internet access expanded as a result of the Obama Administration’s efforts to normalize relations with Cuba, the San Isidro Movement has invited an open conflict with the state.
With provocative performances that have seen its most prominent figures parade through Old Havana waving American flags, and through flagrant displays of contempt for Cuban national symbols, San Isidro has antagonized the authorities, triggering frequent detentions of its members and international campaigns to free them.
By basing itself in a largely Afro-Cuban area of Old Havana and working through mediums like hip-hop, San Isidro has also maneuvered to upend the racially progressive image Cuba’s leftist government earned through its historic military campaign against apartheid South Africa and the asylum it offered to Black American dissidents. Here, the San Isidro Movement appears to be following a blueprint articulated by the US regime change lobby.
Over the past decade, the US government has spent millions of dollars to cultivate anti-government Cuban rappers, rock musicians, artists, and journalists in an explicit bid to weaponize “desocialized and marginalized youth.” The strategy implemented by the US in Cuba is a real life version of the fantasies anti-Trump Democrats entertained when they fretted that Russia was covertly sponsoring Black Lives Matter and Antifa to spread chaos through North American society.
US-backed Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaido appeared alongside Yotuel to celebrate “Patria y Vida” in the EU parliament ” data-medium-file=”https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/pjimage-12.jpg?fit=300%2C169&ssl=1″ data-large-file=”https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/pjimage-12.jpg?fit=1024%2C576&ssl=1″ />As this investigation will reveal, leading members of the San Isidro Movement have raked in funding from regime change outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy and US Agency for International Development while meeting with State Department officials, US embassy staff in Havana, right-wing European parliamentarians and Latin American coup leaders from Venezuela’s Guaidó to OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro.
San Isidro has also welcomed support from a network of free market fundamentalist think tanks which make no secret of their plan to transform Cuba into a colony for multi-national corporations. Days after protests broke out in Cuba, San Isidro’s leadership accepted an award from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a right-wing Republican think tank in Washington that includes Nazi German soldiers in its count of historic deaths at the hands of communism.
Behind their branding as cosmopolitan intellectuals, renegade rappers, and avant garde artists, San Isidro’s has openly embraced the extremist politics of the Miami Cuban lobby. Indeed, its most prominent members have expressed effusive support for Donald Trump, endorsed US sanctions, and clamored for a military invasion of Cuba.
The cultural collective has nonetheless made inroads into progressive circles of North American intelligentsia, working to weaken traditional bonds of solidarity between the Cuban revolution and US left. As we will see, the rise of the San Isidro Movement is the latest chapter in the emerging playbook of intersectional imperialism.
A “forgotten group of people”: Afro-Cuban protest participation captivates US media
The scenes of an overturned police car in Havana’s October 10 neighborhood, mobs pelting police officers with molotov cocktails, and the looting of commercial centers this July 11 ripped the cover off the resentment of a class of citizens that has fallen through the cracks of Cuba’s beleaguered special economy.
Following years of deepening economic deprivation, Cubans have experienced blackouts and food rationing brought on by former President Donald Trump’s intensification of the 60-year-long US economic blockade of Cuba. A sudden collapse in tourism due to the Covid-19 pandemic together with the government’s elimination of Cuba’s dual currency system exacerbated the economic chaos.
While Cuba’s social safety net has prevented this demographic from slipping into the misery familiar to slums of IMF-managed states such as Haiti or Honduras, Escobar says “they are a forgotten group of people, disintegrated, without roots in society. They are expressing the inequality they experience and unfortunately, they are not doing it peacefully anymore.”
US corporate media has seized on the images of Afro-Cuban protesters to paint the demonstrations as an expression of explicitly racialized discontent. In an article headlined, “Afro Cubans at forefront of [Cuba’s] unrest,” the Washington Post quoted anti-government NGO’s and activists associated with the San Isidro Movement denouncing Black Lives Matter for its statement of solidarity with the Cuban revolution.
Left unmentioned by the Washington Post was the role of the US government in backing many of these same NGO’s and activists in a bid to weaponize the Cuba’s underclass. At the forefront of Washington’s strategy are two traditional CIA fronts: the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Throughout the Cold War, USAID worked alongside the CIA to liquidate socialist movements across the Global South. More recently, it helped implement a phony CIA vaccination program in Pakistan to track down Osama bin Laden, and instead wound up spawning a massive polio outbreak. Across Latin America, USAID has funded and trained right-wing opposition figures, including Venezuela’s US-appointed pseudo-president Juan Guaidó.
For its part, the NED was established under the watch of former CIA director William Casey to provide support to opposition activists and media outlets wherever the US has sought regime change. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” NED co-founder Allen Weinstein told journalist David Ignatius, who celebrated the organization as “the sugar-daddy of overt operations.”
Throughout their history, USAID and NED have worked to exploit the grievances of ethnic minority groups against socialist and non-aligned governments. Their financial and logistical support for the Uyghurs against China, the Tatars against Russia, and indigenous Miskito people against Nicaragua are among many examples.
In recent years in Cuba, Washington’s regime change specialists have homed in on Afro-Cubans and marginalized youth, harnessing culture to turn social resentment into counter-revolutionary action.
Weaponizing “desocialized and marginalized youth” against Cuban socialism
A 2009 paper in the Journal of Democracy, the official organ of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), outlined an ambitious blueprint for cultivating Cuba’s post-Cold War underclass as an anti-government vanguard.
“Using the principles of democracy and human rights to unite and mobilize this vast, dispossessed majority in the face of a highly repressive regime is the key to peaceful change,” wrote Carl Gershman and Orlando Gutierrez.
Gershman and Gutierrez are influential figures in the world of overt regime change operators. The founding director of the NED, Gershman presided for four decades over US efforts to destabilize governments from Managua to Moscow. Gutierrez, for his part, is an outspoken advocate of a US military invasion of Cuba who serves as national secretary of the USAID and NED-funded Cuban Democratic Directorate.
Gershman and Gutierrez advised a strategy that encouraged “non-cooperation” with Cuba’s revolutionary institutions among those they described as “‘desocialized’ and marginal youth – the dropouts, the jobless young people who make up nearly three-quarters of Cuba’s unemployed, and those who are drawn to drugs, crime, and prostitution.”
The two regime change specialists pointed to music and online media as ideal vehicles for harnessing the frustrations of Cuban youth: “The alienation of the young reaches into the mainstream and expresses itself in the angry lyrics of rock musicians; the bloggers’ depictions of the frustrations and tawdriness of everyday life; the frequent evasion of agricultural work, voluntary service, and neighborhood committee meetings; and the general disengagement from politics that is the fruit of a half-century of coerced participation and force-fed political propaganda,” they wrote.
The year that Gershman and Gutierrez’s influential paper appeared, Washington enacted an audacious covert operation based on the strategy they outlined.
“Rap is War”: USAID covertly recruits Cuban hip-hop artists as regime change propagandists
In 2009, USAID initiated a program to spark a youth movement against Cuba’s government by cultivating and promoting local hip-hop artists.
Because of its long history as a CIA front, USAID outsourced the operation to Creative Associates International, a Washington DC-based firm with its own track record of covert actions.
Creative Associates found its point man in Rajko Bozic, a veteran of the CIA-backed Otpor! group that helped topple nationalist leader Slobodan Milosevic, and whose members moved on to form an “‘export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds for a number of color revolutions.”
Posing as a music promoter, Bozic approached a Cuban rap group called Los Aldeanos that was known for its ferociously anti-government anthem, “Rap is War.” The Serbian operative never told Los Aldeanos he was a US intelligence asset; instead, he claimed he was a marketing professional and promised to turn the group’s frontman into an international star.
To further the plan, Creative Associates rolled out ZunZuneo, a Twitter-style social media platform that blasted out thousands of automated messages promoting Los Aldeanos to Cuban youth without the rap group’s knowledge.
Within a year, as Los Aldeanos escalated its rhetoric, taunting Cuban police as mindless drones during a local indie music festival, Cuban intelligence discovered contracts linking Bozic to USAID and rolled up the operation.
Embarrassment ensued in Washington, with Sen. Patrick Leahy grumbling, “USAID never informed Congress about this and should never have been associated with anything so incompetent and reckless.”
Danny Shaw, an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the City University of New York, encountered Los Aldeanos during several extended visits to Cuba. He also got to know Omni Zona Franca, a collective of poets and Rastafarian-oriented performance artists based in the Alamar neighborhood of Havana which formed the inspiration for the San Isidro Movement.
Shaw said the artists’ hostility towards Cuba’s socialist system was so intense that many of them denied the US blockade’s existence. “I tried to explain to them my understanding of the economic war, and they said, ‘You can come and go as you please, you don’t live here, so it’s easy for you to be a Marxist.’ And they had a point – if you completely decontextualized the situation,” he told The Grayzone.
According to Shaw, some Omni Zona Franca members began visiting the US and Europe for art festivals and interviews with corporate Spanish-language media. “When the stories about USAID supporting Cuban rappers and artists came out, then it all kind of made sense to me,” he reflected.
In 2014, USAID was exposed again when it tapped Creative Associates to organize a series of phony HIV prevention workshops which were, in fact, political recruitment seminars.
An internal Creative Associates document leaked to the media in 2014 referred to the bogus HIV workshops as the “perfect excuse” to enlist youth into regime change activities on the island.
President Barack Obama introduced his plan to normalize relations with Cuba’s government just as USAID’s latest operation was exposed. As a condition of diplomatic recognition, Obama insisted that Cuba expand internet access.
Venezuelan investigative website Misión Verdad warned at the time, “We are witnessing an update in the mechanisms, methods and modes of intervention. All the harmony at this time is totally illusory. What is already being placed under the label ‘normalization’ in the Cuban sociopolitical environment provides the minimum operating conditions to facilitate the idea of a ‘Cuban spring,’ a test tube revolution…”
Internet expansion opens the door for US infiltration
The 3G internet network arrived in Cuba in 2018, enabling young Cubans to access social media on their phones. Now, instead of spinning out social media platform like ZunZuneo, US intelligence focused on developing technology like Psiphon so Cubans could access Facebook and YouTube despite internet blackouts.
The NED and USAID exploited the opening to build a potent online anti-government media apparatus. The new batch of US-backed outlets like CubaNet, Cibercuba and ADN Cuba represented an echo chamber of toxic insurrectionism, mocking President Miguel Diaz-Canel with insulting memes and calling for his prosecution for high crimes including genocide.
The Dutch Foreign Ministry has advanced the US efforts, helping to set up and fund the anti-government blog, El Toque, through an NGO called RNW Media.
Ted Henken, a US academic and author of “Cuba’s Digital Revolution,” remarked to Reuters that Cuba’s leadership “miscalculated in that they didn’t realize that [expanded internet access] would very quickly, in two and a half years, blow up in their face.”
“None of [protests] would have been possible without the nascent 3G network that has allowed millions of Cubans to access the internet via mobile devices since 2018,” the corporate online outlet Quartz declared.
As Cuban access to anti-government media grew, the Trump administration increased NED’s budget by 22% in 2018.
That year, NED’s Cuba budget earmarked close to $500,000 for the recruitment and training of anti-government journalists, and to establish new media outlets.
Another NED grant budgeted funds to “promote the inclusion of marginalized populations in Cuban society and to strengthen a network of on-island partners,” implying the targeting of Afro-Cubans.
The NED has placed a heavy emphasis on infiltrating Cuba’s hip-hop scene. In 2018, the US government entity contributed $80,000 to the Cuban Soul Foundation to “empower independent artists to produce, perform, and exhibit their work in uncensored community events,” and $70,000 to a Colombia-based NGO called Fundacion Cartel Urbano for “empowering Cuban hip-hop artists as leaders in society.”
NED’s 2018 grant to Cartel Urbano to train Cuban hip-hop artists to promote “social change”
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Cartel Urbano publishes an online magazine clearly modeled off of Vice, the premier vehicle for hipster imperialism. Besides keeping readers informed about the latest releases from anti-government Cuban rap artists, the US government-funded magazine dedicates entire sections on its website to drug use, trans culture, and the green vegan lifestyle.
In catering to the sensibilities of academically oriented, self-styled radicals, the outlet’s writers routinely deploy the letter “x” to erase gender distinctions, leading to passages like the following: “cuerpxs trans, marikonas, no binarixs, racializadxs, monstruosxs…”
