Residents of the building known as "12 plantas," located at the corner of Zanja and Hospital in the municipality of Centro Habana, staged another pot-banging protest early this morning as an expression of frustration over the crisis in Cuba.
The protest was reported as urgent by the user @JaviXCubaLibre on X at 12:25 AM, and the video was amplified by Cántalo TV on Facebook, where it reached over 13,000 views.
The media described the scene accurately: “Neighbors from the building known as '12 plantas', located at Zanja and Hospital in Central Havana, staged a new pot-banging protest amid the collapse that Cuba is experiencing due to blackouts, hunger, and despair.”
The adjective "new" is not by chance: the property, a tall building with a facade of weathered gray concrete and laundry hanging on the balconies, has become a landmark of neighborhood resistance in that municipality.
The protest this morning adds to a sustained wave of mobilizations that has shaken Havana in recent months.
Last Monday, a pot-banging protest took place on Monte Street, also in Centro Habana, where dozens of neighbors—women, men, the elderly, and children—blocked traffic.
On May 13, a massive cacerolazo erupted very close to the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Nuevo Vedado, and days before, there were protests in Marianao, La Lisa, and the Bahía neighborhood.
In Holguín, on May 20, residents of Antilla took to the streets to protest after enduring blackouts lasting more than twenty consecutive hours; the regime's response was repression and arrests.
The wave of protests originates on March 7, 2026, when a nationwide power outage sparked a series of nighttime pot-and-pan banging sessions that spread across multiple municipalities in Havana.
Since then, the pot banging in Centro Habana has been repeated in various corners of the municipality, including Neptuno and Hospital on March 14, and Salud and Belascoaín on March 17, where the police were deployed during a blackout.
The structural trigger for all these mobilizations is the same: blackouts that in some areas exceed twenty hours a day, severe shortages of food and medicines, and the widespread collapse of basic services.
Cántalo TV summed it up clearly: "More and more Cubans are losing their fear and stepping out to express their exhaustion after decades of misery and neglect, while the dictatorship responds with surveillance, threats, and repression."
The cacerolazo —the act of banging pots and pans— is the most widespread form of public protest in Cuba since the demonstrations of July 11, 2021, and its persistence in 2026 reflects that the exhaustion of the population does not yield to the regime's pressure.
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