The activist Yoel Cruz posted a video on Facebook yesterday from the 10 de Octubre municipality in Havana, to denounce that he is being besieged by State Security after participating in a street protest motivated by prolonged power outages and the lack of water.
In the video recorded on June 2, Yoel appears voiceless from the strain of the protest and recounts that an official from the Ministry of the Interior showed up at his home supposedly "to talk" and to offer to arrange a water truck for the following day.
Yoel flatly rejected the offer: "I've been days without water, I've been days without electricity, unable to cook myself decent food, just rice at least, and a fried egg or a hamburger. I can't do anything because I don't have gas."
When the officer asked him, "Do I have electricity in my house?" Yoel replied bluntly, "You are committed to the system, I am not."
The situation worsened when, upon returning from work, his neighbors informed him that two officers—one in green and another in blue—had returned to his house looking for information about the organizers of the protest.
"I say this so you know that I am currently being besieged, so that you understand that if anything happens to me, it is the State Security," Yoel warned, explicitly holding the regime's repressive apparatus responsible.
Regarding who participated in the protest, the activist was emphatic: "They are all in it, man. They're in it. Because if there's one thing I hold in my values and beliefs, it's that I am a tomb."
The siege is not new. In December 2025, Yoel was expelled from his workplace due to his political opinions on social media, and he revealed that State Security had already tried to have him dismissed about three years earlier, although at that time the employer refused.
After that dismissal, several workplaces denied him employment due to political reasons, according to his own account.
The video also has a deeply personal dimension: today marks exactly one year since his brother Yoan Cruz Traba, 50 years old, left home and did not return.
Yoan, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, disappeared on June 2, 2025 and died on July 4 of that year at the Julio Trigo hospital in Havana, where he had been taken from the Day Center for the Homeless in a state of severe malnutrition.
The authorities never notified the family about the hospitalization or the death. Yoel found out through his own efforts and directly held Díaz-Canel, the National Revolutionary Police, and the Center for the Displaced responsible for what happened.
Yoel's protest is part of a wave of mobilizations that is shaking Havana. The pot-banging protests this Tuesday and Wednesday spread across Vedado, Centro Habana, Playa, Regla, and San Miguel del Padrón, with a heavy police presence.
In San Lázaro, protesters pushed back the police after more than 20 hours without electricity, while in Vedado, residents gathered at the intersection of 13 and M after three days without power.
The organization Cubalex has documented at least 14 arrests in the capital related to protests over blackouts since March 6, 2026.
Yoel closed his video with a single question directed at the authorities: "The only question I have for them is Yoan Cruz Traba. I have nothing more to say."
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