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, along with the response he gave when they asked him why he was doing it.
Although the episode occurred about two years ago, amidst the deep energy crisis shaking the island, it remains relevant today due to the ongoing protests that happen daily.
Since the total collapse of the National Electric 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 accurately describes the scene: without electricity, with the heat, the mosquitoes, and the silent refrigerator as quiet witnesses, he took a pot and a spoon and began to bang.
His daughters asked him what he was doing. He didn't know how to respond immediately.
"Because one can say many things: that there is no power, that the country is tired, that people are protesting, that the pots are banging when there’s nothing left," he writes. But all of that seemed too big to explain to two little girls in a room without a fan.
So he hit. And on the third strike, the neighborhood responded.
"From somewhere in the block, another pot responded. Then a lid. Then a frying pan. Then 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 they don't let us 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 policeman, the official with his own power generator, listening. "I liked to think that, for a few minutes, fear had changed houses," he writes.
Joubert reflects on the nature of the protest through pots and pans 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 power prepares for speeches, for slogans, for banners, for enemies with names. But it doesn’t know what to do with a kitchen that rises up against it.”
The power returned that night, as the author describes, "like alms return: late, little, humiliating." Some houses fell silent. Others continued to pound.
The account connects with a long tradition of resistance. The "Protest of the Calderas" in June 1962 in Cárdenas and Perico, Matanzas, is considered the first major mass protest against Fidel Castro's government: housewives banged empty pots and cried out "we want food," and they were suppressed with troops and tanks.
More than six decades later, the same gesture is being repeated. So far in 2026, protests have erupted in multiple locations across Havana and in provinces like Santiago de Cuba, Matanzas, and Granma, with power outages in some areas 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 encapsulates the political dimension of the domestic gesture: "The dictatorship had turned off the light, but it could not silence the ear."
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