Cubans take to the streets due to prolonged blackouts and the widespread crisis

New protests were registered this week in different parts of Cuba, especially in Havana and in some neighborhoods of Santiago de Cuba, amid growing popular discontent over the widespread crisis the country is going through and the prolonged power outages.

The demonstrations began early Wednesday morning, when dozens of people gathered outside the municipal government headquarters of San Miguel del Padrón, in the Cuban capital.

The protesters expressed their discontent with the economic and energy situation affecting the population, denouncing power outages that, in some cases, exceed 24 consecutive hours.

As night fell, the protests spread to several Havana municipalities such as Diez de Octubre, Marianao, Playa and the Vedado and Puentes Grandes areas.

Residents of these towns held pot-banging protests, blocked streets, and set fire to piles of accumulated garbage as a way of rejecting the blackouts and the deterioration of living conditions.

One of the most intense demonstrations took place in the Santo Suárez neighborhood, in the Diez de Octubre municipality. According to activist Adelth Bonne, a resident of the area, the protest spread throughout practically the entire neighborhood. He stated that Serrano Street, from the Malecón Sin Agua (Waterless Boardwalk) to the hills of Correa and Encarnación, was littered with burning trash cans.

Amid the protests, internet outages were also reported in several areas of Havana on Wednesday night, a situation that often coincides with episodes of social mobilization on the island and that has been denounced previously by human rights organizations and Cuban activists.

The new demonstrations reflect the growing exhaustion of the population in the face of a crisis marked by daily blackouts, food shortages, the deterioration of basic services, inflation and a lack of freedoms.

Just hours before these protests erupted, the Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, acknowledged on the Mesa Redonda program that there was no fuel on the island. “We have absolutely no fuel, we have absolutely no diesel,” he added. @ADNCuba