Complaining in Cuba Is Not the Same as Protesting
The limits between two rights the regime seeks to confuse
By Eloy Viera Cañive (El Toque)
HAVANA TIMES – Official discourse in Cuba has once again equated citizen protest with the right to complain, deeming any public demonstration outside the framework of “institutionality” as illegitimate.
During a meeting held on October 3, 2025, to assess the situation in Havana, Miguel Diaz-Canel acknowledged that the population’s “demands” are legitimate but insisted they must be channeled through the institutional framework of the State and the Communist Party he leads.
The use of the term “demand” was no accident. It served as a rhetorical substitute for the word “protest” — which is what the president was actually referring to. The clearest indication of this came in the same sentence, when Díaz-Canel warned that blocking streets prevents essential services. With that phrasing — reducing protest to the act of blocking streets — the Cuban president sought to justify the repression or dispersal of public gatherings.
Such official expressions are not new. Since the Fidel-era axiom “the streets belong to the revolutionaries,” the Cuban regime has tried to encapsulate the expression of citizen dissatisfaction within the right to complain or petition. It does so fully aware that, in a system without separation of powers, the state bureaucracy has absolute control to silence or neutralize any “institutionalized” discontent.
A clear example of the Cuban regime’s view of the right to protest is the way it has handled its legal framework since the 2019 Constitution was approved. At that time, the government included in its legislative calendar the drafting of a decree-law to regulate the right of demonstration and a new law on associations, both closely tied to the exercise of protest.
However, over time, both initiatives were postponed and then removed from legislative agendas. In contrast, the regime did enact in 2023 a law regulating the right to complain and petition, thereby reinforcing its strategy of channeling citizen discontent through controlled, bureaucratic mechanisms — without even nominally recognizing the right to public mobilization.
For that reason, it bears repeating: both concepts (complaint/demand and protest) are not the same, neither in legal language nor in democratic practice.
The Right to Complain: A Vertical Relationship with Power
The right to complain is an institutionalized form of petition to the authorities. It allows an individual to express dissatisfaction or denounce administrative acts and state decisions, expecting a response within official channels.
It is an individual, formal, and vertical right: the citizen appeals to power, asking it to correct something. In most countries, it is recognized as part of the right to petition and is exercised through letters, claims, or administrative processes.
In the Cuban context, the State often presents this mechanism as the “proper” way to express discontent. But by limiting public expression to a bureaucratic procedure, it neutralizes the political nature of dissent.
The Right to Protest: A Collective and Political Expression
The right to protest, on the other hand, is a collective manifestation of freedom of expression, assembly, and association. Its purpose is not merely to convey a complaint, but to make dissent visible and exert social or political pressure to bring about change.
Protest is an act of horizontal citizen participation: the people communicate among themselves and with power in public spaces. It is protected by international treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Article 21) and the American Convention on Human Rights (Article 15).
To deny or criminalize protest on the grounds that “institutional channels for complaints exist” is, in practice, a form of political censorship.
By insisting that demands must be made “in established places,” Cuban authorities equate protest with disorder and reduce citizen participation to the role of obedient petitioner.
But complaining is not protesting — and silence imposed by fear or censorship is not social stability. The difference between the two rights is not merely technical: it is the line dividing a participatory democracy from a repressive regime that tolerates only absolute obedience.
First published in Spanish by El Toque and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.