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While entire neighborhoods in Havana remain nearly dark all day, La Piragua, the recreational space along the Malecón, keeps its nighttime festivities illuminated until dawn, creating a contrast that has sparked outrage among citizens on social media.
"The absurd party at the Piragua in El Vedado must have a Nuclear Energizer for its Reguetontofunctioning. The Circus illuminating is perpetual. What will they celebrate every night without stopping?" questioned the user Leovaldodf Díaz this Saturday on Facebook.
Public outrage in the comments was unanimous. "For this, there’s plenty of oil. An entire country suffers from blackouts, without water, without food, but when it comes to makeup, there’s everything," wrote a user.
Another voice summarized the situation with a phrase that has been circulating on Cuban social media for months: "Bread and Circuses."
A third comment pointed to the political background of the issue. "When the most important thing is to show normalcy, these things happen, brother," he said.
"Likewise, they don't even have an audience, those freeloaders of the people; no one is in the mood for celebration anymore, we are dying of hunger," summarized a citizen on social media, in a phrase that encapsulates the frustration of a population that has been silently supporting the spectacle of the establishment for years.
The most well-documented case occurred on May 20, when a resident of the Focsa building area, also in El Vedado, reported in the Facebook group Unión Eléctrica en Cuba that his area had only four hours of electricity that Sunday, while La Piragua hosted a party that lasted until two in the morning.
"The situation with La Piragua seems never-ending, but now we also have the Cubadisco fair at Pabellón Cuba cutting off our electricity. Today, Sunday, we had only four hours of power at Focsa and the surrounding area," wrote the complainant, identified as Guglielmo Tell.
The same neighbor described how, after the party, groups of people wandered through the neighborhood and ended up in bottle fights in front of the Capri hotel, and directly questioned the regime: "Do we have to be prisoners in our homes and apartments so that a handful of oligarchs-businessmen can live it up?"
The pattern of guaranteed light for events and blackouts for the people repeats regularly. The Capri Hotel held a party in October 2025 while Vedado was in the dark.
The Pa'Cuba Festival launched in March with neighboring neighborhoods experiencing power outages, while just a few days ago the Summer Start 2K26 in Varadero provided 72 continuous hours of music with guaranteed electricity, even as the country faced deficits of nearly 2,000 MW.
This Saturday, the Electric Union projected an impact of up to 1,990 MW during the nighttime peak, with only 1,090 MW available against a demand of 3,050 MW. The shutdown of the plant located in Felton, Holguín, on Saturday afternoon further worsened the system, already strained by the outage of Antonio Guiteras in Matanzas.
During the last few days, protests using pots and pans erupted in multiple neighborhoods in Havana, such as Regla, El Vedado, Guanabacoa, La Timba, Santos Suárez, El Cerro, Marianao, Plaza de la Revolución, and La Habana Vieja, with residents reporting that they had only two hours of electricity over the course of four days.
The Cuban Ministry of Tourism publicly acknowledged in September 2025 that hotels have their own generators to operate normally during power outages, and Minister Juan Carlos García Granda justified this prioritization in June 2025.
Meanwhile, the Cuban Observatory of Conflicts recorded 1,133 protests just in April, of which 153 were related to power outages and water shortages.
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