The 2021 Cuba protests are the July demonstrations that dominated American television for several days, and which John Kiriakou declined to treat as the start of anything.
Not a revolution
Asked directly, his answer was unqualified: “I agree completely. This is not a revolution. I think it’s a test run as well.” What was being tested, on his reading, was the government’s response — “they’re going to gauge the government’s reaction. The government, if they’re smart, they’re going to try to institute some reforms — and then we see what happens six months from now.”[1][2]
Against ‘treading lightly’
A New York Times piece had argued that Joe Biden and the Democrats would have to tread lightly in Florida because of the Cuban-American vote. Kiriakou’s objection was that the advice was empty: “that was part of the problem that I had with this piece — they didn’t say what that’s supposed to mean. You can’t just throw this idea into the middle of the room and have everybody just nod their heads.”[3][4]
His alternative was simple and did not depend on the answer: “if this is a legitimate uprising, if this is the beginning of a legitimate revolution in Cuba, well then that’s good for everybody except maybe the Communist Party’s leadership. But treading lightly? No — what you do is you make an announcement that you want the best for the Cuban people.”[4]
The underlying difficulty he names is domestic: “everything surrounding Cuba is just so politically loaded in the United States.”[5]
An aside on the coverage
Discussing how American media had handled the summit between Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden a few weeks earlier, Kiriakou agreed that the press had been “so much more rabid” about opposing Putin than the president himself was — the same asymmetry he saw applied to Cuba.[6]