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A mother from the neighborhood Zamora, in Marianao (Havana), was arrested, handcuffed, and forcibly placed into a police patrol in the early hours of June 1, while shouting that her son was hungry during a protest against the blackouts affecting the area.
The story was published on Facebook by neighbor and activist Zea Gisselle under the slogan "If one of us is harmed, all of us are harmed."
The demonstration began on the night of May 31 at 9:20 p.m. with the sound of pots and pans coming from the houses, while it was raining. When the rain stopped around 11 p.m., a large group of neighbors gathered at the intersection of 124th and 35th Streets.
The neighborhood had been experiencing over a week of power outages lasting more than 16 hours a day, with only two or three hours of electricity in the early morning, making it difficult to cook, pump water, and rest.
The president of the Zamora-CocoSolo Council, identified as Sandra, and the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) in Marianao, who did not identify himself by name, attended the location. They were accompanied by two patrols from the National Revolutionary Police (PNR) and plainclothes State Security agents.
The PCC official ruled out restoring electricity that night and offered this solution: “If the issue is food, tomorrow we’ll bring a truck with food boxes and sell them for 100 CUP, but we’re not going to restore the electricity right now.”
Around 1 a.m., a child began to scream desperately: "Mom, mom, I'm hungry!" His mother, identified in the official citation from the Ministry of the Interior as Yansis Valladares, got up and walked toward the patrol cars, shouting that her son was hungry. The police detained her, handcuffed her, and forcibly placed her in the vehicle, leaving the child alone in the street, crying and trembling.
The other mothers present physically positioned themselves in front of the patrol, demanding her release: "Let the mother go; she hasn't done anything, she didn't harm anyone, she hasn't committed vandalism!"
The vehicle reversed and took her away anyway. A neighbor, a former coordinator of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) at the Zamora Council, took the child to a nearby café where the owner provided him with a plate of food and cookies.
At 1:15 a.m., while the mothers threatened to go in masses to the Sixth Station of the PNR, the authorities restored electricity in Zamora. At 1:56 a.m., Valladares was returned to the neighborhood in a black private vehicle, not in a patrol car.
On Monday, June 1, the mother attended the summons issued by the Ministry of the Interior. She was fined 30 CUP and was threatened with having her child taken away and placed in a "Home for the Sons of the Homeland" if she protested again.
During the interrogation, they asked her if she was a Dama de Blanco and who supported her. According to Zea Gisselle, the official accusation was that the mother had "assaulted her own son," a documented tactic of the regime to criminalize those who report on shortages.
Marianao has been a recurring site of protests in 2026. The Cuban Conflict Observatory recorded 1,245 protests in March —the highest monthly figure since July 11, 2021— and 1,133 in April, with 176 documented repressive acts occurring in that month alone.
"The only way to protect ourselves and our children is for all the mothers to be together," wrote Zea Gisselle as she finished her story, while the Zamora neighborhood returned to its almost perpetual blackout.
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