Days before the ‘rate increase’, no one could have predicted that the students would regain their rebellion.
14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Generation Y, Havana, 18 June 2025 — The Cuban regime is holding its breath. There are only a few days left until the end of the academic year in all the island’s faculties, a period that this year is proving to be an uphill struggle for oficialdom. In the classrooms of higher education, outrage has multiplied over the price increases implemented late last month by the state telecommunications monopoly, Etecsa. After decades of being muzzled, university students seem to have regained their voice.
Protests against the popularly known “tarifazo” have swept across all social strata in Cuba, but students have been the most vocal in their reactions. The need to constantly turn to the internet for bibliography to support their courses, the desire to escape a stifling reality through social media, and the many emigrated relatives and friends they want to stay in touch with, make web browsing as imperative at these ages as food, transportation, and a roof over one’s head.
However, just days before the declarations of opposition to Etecsa began to pour from the desks, no one could have predicted that the University would regain its rebelliousness. The epicenter of many of the political changes that shook Cuban politics during the colonial and republican eras, our Alma Mater seemed to have been totally controlled and domesticated by the Communist Party. Years of purges, rigged elections, reprisals, and expulsions of inconvenient professors managed to transform a natural youthful disobedience into pure docility. Until one day.
Under the slogan that “the university is for revolutionaries,” Castroism implemented ideological filters that forced students to ‘fake it’
Under the slogan “the university is for revolutionaries,” Castro’s regime implemented ideological filters that forced students to pretend and to wear an ideological mask to allow them to graduate. The faculties, which had once given rise to revolts and social uprisings, became places where government policies were applauded and the olive-green leaders’ cult of personality spread. The University Student Federation became a sounding board for the power to speak to the students, and only the most trusted teachers taught in the classrooms.
But enough! The announcement of an internet connection price increase was enough for the academic outcry to spread to dozens of faculties, where students collected signatures, joined in on statements, and stood up to the rectors. More than two weeks after the price hike began, university students in several provinces continue to publish letters of protest, voice their criticisms in assemblies, and receive threats. The image of higher education, one hundred percent in tune with Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución, has been irreparably shattered.
Political police have attempted to divide the protesters, visited the homes of students leading the demand to reverse the rising costs of connecting to the world’s largest network, and warned of short-term repercussions for those who insist on publicly complaining.
For their part, young people are responding by calling for a strike in classrooms at several educational institutions and continuing to resist in meetings with administrators and officials. In an audio recording leaked in recent hours, the rector of the University of Havana can be heard saying that “if it’s a strike, then it’s a counterrevolution,” alluding to the implications of students stopping showing up to class. But her voice hasn’t sounded with the authoritarian conviction of yesteryear, but rather with a certain tone of fear, the fear of a political class when it senses that university youth, long dormant, are awakening.
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on DW and is republished with the author’s license.
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