Neighbors from the Nuevo Vedado neighborhood in Havana staged a mass pot-banging protest on Thursday night, just a few blocks away from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, amidst a blackout that left the neighborhood completely dark.
The journalist Magdiel Jorge Castro shared images and videos of the protest on his social media, displaying silhouette buildings without electricity against a night sky.
"I hope Díaz-Canel listens closely to the noise of the protest tonight," Castro wrote while sharing the images.
The protest took place during one of the most critical moments of the Cuban energy crisis: on that very day, the Unión Eléctrica projected a deficit of 1,842 MW for the peak night hours, resulting in a power outage affecting 62% of the national territory.
Only in Havana were there 1,676 reports of blackouts with an average duration of 24 hours. The municipalities most affected were Playa, with 192 reports, followed by Regla with 182, Cerro with 181, and Centro Habana with 169.
The electricity crisis has also worsened access to drinking water in the capital. More than 200,000 residents of Havana were left without regular service, nearly 11% of the population, according to Abel Fernández Díaz, director of the Aqueduct of Aguas de La Habana.
On that same Thursday, the leader Miguel Díaz-Canel publicly acknowledged that Cuba is completely lacking fuel for almost everything, attributing the crisis to the cessation of supply from Venezuela.
The pot-banging protest in Nuevo Vedado is not an isolated incident. The same neighborhood had already seen similar protests on March 13 and 15 of 2026, and on March 23, there were pot-banging protests directly in front of the PCC Central Committee in Vedado.
The symbolic proximity of these demonstrations to the seat of Cuban political power gives them a particularly significant weight.
The wave of protests began on March 6, 2026 and has spread to dozens of neighborhoods in Havana—Vedado, Centro Habana, Alamar, El Cerro, La Güinera—and provinces such as Ciego de Ávila.
The organization Cubalex documented 156 protests and 47 arrests up until March 17, while at least 14 people have been detained specifically for participating in pot-banging protests since the onset of the wave of demonstrations.
The regime's response has combined repression with political disqualification. Yuniasky Crespo Baquero, head of the Ideological Department of the PCC Central Committee, characterized the protests as "vandalism" that does not equate to "legitimate dissent."
The Ministry of the Interior described them as a "counter-revolutionary provocation orchestrated by mercenaries."
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