Food Shortages, COVID-19, and Instagram: The Driving Forces Behind the Cuba Protests

In a video posted to YouTube in February, a teenager named Alita panned her camera in a Havana grocery store to show aisle after aisle of neatly stacked, identical yellow bottles of cooking oil—and not much else. “Oil, oil, oil, oil,” she says behind her mask, laughing at the absurdity. “Since they didn’t have anything else they said, ‘Let’s put out all the oil we have’…but I need something to fry in it. I don’t know what we’ll do. I guess we’ll fry air.” Large refrigerated sections of the supermarket were all completely bare. “Oil, water, rum, and salt,” her mother said with resigned exasperation. At the end, they left with four bottles of cooking oil and a cleaning rag. Still, Alita pointed out the positives: for once, they barely had to wait in line, and the store still accepted convertible Cuban pesos, known as CUC. “In a few months, that won’t be possible,” she said, referring to the Cuban government’s plan to phase out its dual currency system, devaluing its peso for the first time since the 1959 revolution. The pandemic’s blunt impact on Cuba’s economy, already struggling under the Trump-era tightening of sanctions, has brought the island to…
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