Breitbart The administration of President Joe Biden has invited a prominent Cuban rapper, a food blogger turned left-wing policy activist, and a former staffer for President Barack Obama to a meeting on Friday to discuss the ongoing repression of dissidents in Cuba.
The White House previewed the guestlist for the event, scheduled for Friday afternoon, to the Associated Press on Thursday. The meeting followed a virtual discussion Biden hosted last week with Cuban-American celebrities Gloria Estefan and Andy García, among others, on the issue.
“The White House did not provide more details, only saying that new sanctions will be discussed as well as ways to establish internet access for the Cuban people,” the AP reported.
Protests erupted nationwide in Cuba on July 11 demanding an end to the Communist Party’s rule of the island, which began in 1959. The protests consisted almost entirely of peaceful marches and assemblies in every major city of the country and featured attendees clearly chanting “freedom!” and other anti-communist slogans. The Castro regime responded to the protests with overwhelming violence, including opening fire on unarmed protesters, publicly beating individuals believed to be participating in protests, and allegedly torturing and sexually assaulting those imprisoned.
Human rights activists and members of the Cuban exile community have urged Biden to take action against the regime through sanctions, weapons aid, or restoring internet access to Cuban users after the Castro regime shut it down. Republican lawmakers – many of them representing large Cuban-American populations – have also requested a meeting with the president to discuss moving forward with policies to aid the dissidents. Biden responded by organizing the Estefan Zoom meeting and sanctioning one Cuban official who predecessor Donald Trump had already sanctioned, a move panned as “symbolic but meaningless.”
Biden’s meeting Friday will reportedly focus on restoring internet to the island to allow Cubans to share videos of police brutality and other real-time oppression by the Castro regime. At the top of the AP’s invite list is music artist Yotuel Romero, formerly of the rap group Orishas. Romero is one of several Cuban artists behind the hit single “Patria y Vida,” released this February as a protest anthem against the regime. The song’s title, which translates to “Fatherland and Life,” is an inversion of the Communist Party slogan patria o muerte, meaning “fatherland or death.”
Patria y vida has become a rallying cry and representative slogan of the protest movement in Cuba and the diaspora.
Speaking to Granma in 2016 about the Orishas reuniting that year for the first time in eight years, Romero said, “We always had good relations with our country. For example, in this reunion we have had all the support of Cuban music institutions.” All Cuban artistic institutions are government-run, through the Ministry of Culture; Cuba made it illegal to write songs, draw, or film anything without a preemptive permit from the Ministry in 2019.
