Protestors take the streets of Cuba. Photo: Google

By KELIN DILLON

While protestors against the country’s government have filled the streets of Cuba, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) went out of his way to publicly declare his support for the Miguel Díaz-Canel administration during a press conference on the morning of Monday, July 12.

Hundreds of people began protesting in Cuba on Sunday, July 11, challenging the country’s failed response to covid-19, and a drastic shortage of medicines and other basic supplies. The confrontations heated up between them and Cuba’s security forces, leading to several violent clashes and a multitude of arrests.

López Obrador offered to send medications and vaccines to Cuba during this time “without any political tendency or bias,” despite Mexico’s own shortage of prescriptions and often complicated inoculation process.

Still, AMLO turned the protests political, claiming that they were caused by foreign intervention in Cuba.

“I see that they are intervening,” said López Obrador. “For example, yesterday I saw a message on social networks from a group called Article 19, which is a journalistic association financed in Mexico by the United States government, by the United States Embassy in Mexico, ​​and yesterday, coincidentally, this same organization, which we have already denounced, took a photo and this is just a sample of what they have done worldwide against those who do not agree with the Cuban government.”

AMLO continued to say that “the first thing that should be done is to suspend the blockade of Cuba as requested by the majority of the peoples of the world.”

“That would be a truly humanitarian gesture,” he said. “No country in the world should be surrounded.”