UploadUpload URLHotlinkRandomAbout
Historic protests enabled by social media and cell-phone footage are threatening to finally end Castro's revolutionary regime.
------------------
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/ReasonTV?subconfirmation=1
Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magazine/
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason
Reason is the planet's leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won't get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
----------------
On Sunday, July 11, thousands of Cubans in 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 Diaz-Canel allowed citizens access to the internet on their cellphones.
To better understand exactly how Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and other social media platforms are empowering the Cuban people and undermining state control, Reason spoke with Ted Henken, a sociologist at City University of New York's Baruch College and the co-editor of Cuba's Digital Revolution.
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Ian Keyser. Intro by Paul Detrick.
Photo: Brian Lawless/ZUMA Press/Newscom, ALEXANDRE MENEGHINI/REUTERS/Newscom, Axelle de Russe/Polaris/Newscom
points