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A Cuban father named Rioger Joubert posted on Facebook a text titled "The Symphony of the Pots," in which he recounts the moment he decided to hit a pot during a blackout in Cuba while his wife Daliana and their two daughters watched him, and the response he gave them when they asked why he was doing it.
Although the episode took place about two years ago, amid the deep energy crisis affecting the island, it remains relevant today due to the ongoing protests that occur daily.
Since the total collapse of the National Electroenergetic System on October 18, 2024, pot-banging has become the most widespread and spontaneous form of protest among the Cuban people.
In the text, Joubert describes the scene with precision: without electricity, with the heat, the mosquitoes, and the silent refrigerator as mute witnesses, he took a pot and a spoon and began to strike.
His daughters asked him what he was doing. He couldn't answer right away.
"Because one can say many things: that there is no power, that the country is tired, that people protest, that the pots rattle when there's nothing left," he writes. But all of that seemed too overwhelming to explain to two little girls in a room without a fan.
So he knocked. And with the third knock, the neighborhood responded.
"From somewhere in the block, another pot responded. Then a lid. Then a frying pan. Next, several metals at once—poor, clumsy, domestic, furious," Joubert recounts. It was then that he said to his daughters, "Do you hear?"
When they asked again why, the father found the answer: "Because when we're not allowed to speak, we make noise."
The text also describes the fear he felt while hitting, and something he calls "dirty and necessary": the satisfaction of imagining the sector chief, the police officer, the official with his own power generator, listening. "I liked to think that, for a few minutes, fear had changed homes," he writes.
Joubert reflects on the nature of the cacerolazo as a tool of resistance: "An empty pot is a mean instrument. It has no nobility. It has no anthem. It has no uniform. That is why it is effective. Because those in power prepare for speeches, for slogans, for banners, for enemies with names. But they do not know what to do with a kitchen that rises up against them."
The power returned that night, as the author describes, "like donations return: late, sparse, humiliating." Some houses fell silent. Others continued to bang.
The account connects with a long tradition of resistance. The "Protest of the Pots" in June 1962 in Cárdenas and Perico, Matanzas, is regarded as the first major mass protest against Fidel Castro's government: housewives beat empty pots while shouting "we want food," and they were suppressed with troops and tanks.
More than six decades later, the same gesture is repeated. So far in 2026, the pot banging has erupted in multiple areas of Havana and in provinces such as Santiago de Cuba, Matanzas, and Granma, with power outages in some regions exceeding 43 consecutive hours.
The Cuban Prosecutor's Office confirmed in November 2024 criminal proceedings against individuals who protested due to power outages.
Joubert closes his text with a phrase that summarizes the political dimension of the domestic gesture: "The dictatorship had turned off the light, but it could not turn off the ear."
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