What of the Cubans?

It seems to me that over the past year or so, there have been two types of demonstration, the Black Lives Matter type, and the populist type. I think Black Lives Matter and the related Critical Race Theory are mislabeled as Marxist (I haven't seen the term Marxist-Leninist used at all, but that would be more accurate if it were correctly applied). BLM is an alliance between bourgeois elites and the Lumpenproletariat. Bourgeois are the traditionial Marxist enemy, while the lumpenproles, street rabble and petty criminals, are unreliable as allies of workers. Nothing could be less Marxist in principle.

The Leninist component of Marxism-Leninism, something the bourgeois Edmund Wilson nevertheless recognized in To The Finland Station, added the extreme ruthlessness necessary to accomplish a revolutionary agenda, without which no such activity can move beyond idle theorizing and play-acting. The problem with both BLM and CRT is that neither recognizes the need for ruthlessness, including the need to pick the right allies and the need to liquidate disloyal elements, which unfortunatrely include both the bourgeois elites and the lumpenproles. (Solzhenitsyn saw the lumpenproles as useful primarily to victimize and torment the bourgeois in the gulag.)

Among other things, this reading suggests that the current bourgeois elites who run the media and the blue states and cities are neither serious nor ruthless enough to maintain hold on power, but at best, Marxist-Leninists have been able to do this for only several generations in any particular country.

This brings us to the other kind of demonstration, the populist. Their demonstrations arise from more spontaneous grievances and tend to be opportunistic. Over the past year, there have been fairly minor demonstrations against lockdown measures in the US, and it's worth noting that these have primarily involved workers and lower-level bourgeois forced out of their jobs or businesses, whose interests opposed the elites, whose income continued throughout the lockdowns. In the US, this spirit culminated in the January 6 incursion into the US Capitol, which the elites have hysterically claimed was worse than 9/11, or now even the Confederacy.

This is a reflection of legitimate class interests, as opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement, which depends on an alliance between out-of-touch elites and a rabble that's willing to play the game for only as long as it suits them.

But this brings us to Cuba. They remind me to some extent of the 1989 popular demonstrations that brought down communist rule in the Warsaw Pact, something I suspect the current Cuban regime recognizes. It clearly fears the influence of social media:

“As if pandemic outbreaks had not existed all over the world, the Cuban-American mafia, paying very well on social networks to influencers and YouTubers, has created a whole campaign … and has called for demonstrations across the country,” President Díaz-Canel said during a nationally televised appearance on July 12 “in which his entire Cabinet was present,” according to the AP. “Mafia” is a common Communist Party term for the Cuban-American exile community, comprised almost entirely of victims of the violent Party’s 62-year rule.

“We’ve seen how the campaign against Cuba was growing on social media in the past few weeks,” he added. “That’s the way it’s done: Try to create inconformity, dissatisfaction by manipulating emotions and feelings.”

As a result it's been shutting down internet access for short periods, but this hasn't been especially successful. I think the outcome in Cuba will depend on how ruthless the regime is prepared to be, along with how many of its hard-core retainers in the state organs it can rely on to carry out its continuing requirements for ruthlessness.

Past a certain point, even the secret police tire of the effort.