WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden said the United States supports the Cuban people and called their rare protests a “clarion call for freedom and relief” from the pandemic and generations of dictatorship.

“We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime,” Biden said in a statement obtained by McClatchy.

“The Cuban people are bravely asserting fundamental and universal rights,” Biden said. “Those rights, including the right of peaceful protest and the right to freely determine their own future, must be respected. The United States calls on the Cuban regime to hear their people and serve their needs at this vital moment rather than enriching themselves.”

The president’s response comes one day after thousands of people took to the streets in cities and towns across Cuba, including Havana, to call for an end to the nation’s decades-old dictatorship and demand food and vaccines, as shortages of basic necessities have reached crisis proportions and COVID-19 cases have soared.

The unprecedented protests erupted in several of the island’s largest cities — Havana, Santiago, Santa Clara, Matanzas, Cienfuegos and Holguín — but also in smaller towns like San Antonio de los Bañols, Palma Soriano, Cárdenas, Colón, Guira de Melena, Artemisa and others.

Videos show members of the police beating and even shooting demonstrators, after Cuba’s handpicked president told his loyalists to go out and confront protesters. “We´ll do anything,” he said, to stop the uprising. “The streets are for the revolutionaries.”

On a televised Sunday address, Cuba’s handpicked president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, blamed the protests on the United States as a plan to “asphyxiate” the country through sanctions to trigger a social uprising. On Monday morning, Díaz-Canel called the Sunday events a “historical day in defense of the revolution.”

On Sunday evening, National Security adviser Jake Sullivan tweeted that the United States “would strongly condemn any violence or targeting of peaceful protesters who are exercising their universal rights.”

Last time Cubans took to the streets to protest against the Communist government was in 1994, when Fidel Castro was alive.

But the uprising, known as the Maleconazo, only took place in Havana and didn’t last long, as the former Cuban leader quickly turned the demonstrations into a massive exodus after he opened Cuba’s maritime borders.