Dozens of residents of the San Miguel del Padrón municipality in Havana took to the streets this Saturday night to protest against the power outages and the severe water shortages they have been experiencing lately.
At the shout of "put on the water" and banging pots, a group of Cubans demonstrated in the San Francisco de Paula popular council and marched through its streets protesting until they reached Calzada de Güines.
"Right now Cuba is in the streets, today, August 24, 2024, San Francisco de Paula. Right now, 11:36 pm," reported the X user identified as Yanko Mesa, who shared videos of the protesters.
The protest comes after days of severe issues with potable water supply in the Cuban capital and an increase in blackouts, a result of the collapse of the national electro-energy system (SEN).
At the end of July, the company Aguas de La Habana reported that the capital continued to have problems with water supply after the breakdown that destroyed the pipeline of the Cuenca Sur supply source, which the authorities attributed to a power outage.
Inés María Chapman, the First Vice Minister of the Republic, visited the Aguas de La Habana Company around that time to learn about the actions being taken amid what she described as a "complex situation with the service."
At the end of June, Cuban authorities sent a water truck guarded by the police to a neighborhood in Old Havana, where the population took to the streets to protest after more than 10 days without access to water.
Several hours after the protest, the Municipal Management Council of the territory reported that the problem had been resolved with a truck they sent to the site.
At the end of September 2022, amid an exasperating wave of blackouts that sparked protests in several towns and cities in Cuba, particularly massive ones in the Cuban capital, the Havana neighborhood of San Francisco de Paula joined the demonstrations, despite the heavy police presence in the area.
Videos published by the protesters on social media showed more than two hundred people in the streets, banging pots and drums to demand the restoration of electricity service, after more than 48 hours of blackout, shouting "water and electricity."
The unrest expressed on the streets prompted a response from the Cuban regime, which carried out a large police deployment aimed at intimidating the protesters and quelling the demonstrations led by residents of Cerro, Párraga, San Francisco de Paula, Arroyo Naranjo, among other municipalities and neighborhoods in Havana.
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