MIAMI (CNS) -- With Cuba's shutdown of the internet and other communications for nearly three days, the world has been mostly in the dark about developments on the island nation since the unprecedented protests in Havana and elsewhere in the country July 11.
It is hard to know what is happening in Cuba now, said Andy S. Gomez, a retired assistant provost and dean of international studies at the University of Miami.
The Miami Herald reported the Cuban government shut down social media and messaging apps July 12 and the service stoppage continued through July 13 and part of July 14.
An ABC News story said that while social media activity was increasing, "the level of censorship has also risen." The internet had helped spread the word about the July 11 protests.
Gomez said the street demonstrations were a reaction to Cuba's growing economic woes, the growing coronavirus pandemic and "the frustration of young people who see no hope for the future, and it has got to get to a point where it boils over."
But, he added with caution, "to me, change there does not have a clear definition."
Gomez and his wife were among several hundred South Florida Catholics who traveled to Cuba in 2015 in support of the historic visit of Pope Francis to the island.
He worried a protracted demonstration against the repressive regime could mirror the situation in Venezuela, where finally the movement was exhausted and squelched by the military-backed socialist government.
"It's very easy from here to call on the people to stand up (and support) the protests, but you can be thrown in jail without due process for years, and I had heard there were already people who had disappeared," said Gomez, who was a senior fellow at the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies before his retirement.
There were news reports July 13 of at least one protester being shot and killed in a suburb of Havana during a clash between protesters and police, and a social media activist was reportedly arrested live on TV by Cuban security forces that same day.
Gomez told Catholic News Service he wonders if Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel is losing control of the situation and if former Cuban President Raul Castro will step in to replace him if the worsening situation shines a bad light on Cuba for much longer.
Geopolitically, the Cuba situation, along with chaos in Haiti following the July 7 assassination of its president, has created an international crisis in the region and is compounded by Russian interests in Cuba's strategic location, Gomez said. Add to that the low rate of coronavirus vaccination in Cuba and Haiti and there is always the possibility of mass migration out of those two islands, he said.
Gomez said he would have liked to see the United States, for humanitarian reasons, allow continuation of family-to-family financial support through Western Union remittances, which were lost after the latest U.S. sanctions were imposed on the communist nation.
Timely emergency shipments of humanitarian medicines and vaccines to Cuba also would have relieved the pressure-cooker situation there.
But "I would not be surprised if Cuba would have turned that down," Gomez added. "Their vaccine's effectiveness is unknown and they refuse to report to the world any data so we don't know if they are just putting water into people's arms."