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The Cuban baritone and theater director Ulises Aquino Guerra publicly and emphatically replied this Thursday to filmmaker Eduardo del Llano, after the latter shared a satirical text on his Facebook page that mocked the protest banging of pots and pans in Havana as if they were organized by time slots with fines for those who played outside their turn.
The text from Del Llano mimicked an official statement that divided the capital into six blocks with assigned times for protests, and included mocking references to "ultra-resistant pots, donations from Russia and Mexico, with a guarantee of ten thousand uses without deterioration," as well as prohibiting "any nonsense during the hours of 4 to 6 am."
Aquino Guerra did not take long to respond. In his Facebook post, the baritone strongly rejected the filmmaker's humorous tone and defended those who bang their pots every night amid power outages, mosquitoes, and hunger.
"No one goes out to bang pots and pans to liven up the agonizing nights they endure, filled with mosquitoes, the anguish of blackouts, and even hunger and desperation," wrote Aquino.
The founder of Ópera de la Calle described Del Llano's post as a mockery of "something so sacred," which constitutes "a true and incredible tragedy," and expressed feeling "great shame" for those who make jokes in that context.
Although he acknowledged respecting Del Llano as a creator, Aquino did not hold back in his harsh judgment of him as a person: "As a man, as a citizen, and as a Cuban, I am ashamed of your cowardice, your abjection, and your lack of respect for all those who, in their most legitimate right, have nothing else but to cry out in pain."
The baritone also reproached him for the missed opportunity: "If you wanted to draw attention, it would have been more dignified to put yourself in the shoes of those who suffer."
He closed his message with a straightforward phrase: "What a shameful citizen you are."
The exchange occurs amid a wave of popular protests that have shaken Cuba since at least March 2026, when noise demonstrations were reported in multiple neighborhoods of Havana, Matanzas, and Holguín over consecutive nights, in response to power outages exceeding 24 hours a day.
In Marianao, residents gathered to burn trash containers during a blackout on March 13, while in Holguín, protests were reported in Mayarí with people taking to the streets "with the sound of pots" on the 15th of that same month.
On June 5, the sound of the pots and pans was described as the "soundtrack of exhaustion" in response to an energy crisis deemed "unprecedented."
The debate between Aquino and Del Llano reveals a real tension within the Cuban intellectual world: whether political humor can —or should— be applied to a situation of massive, daily suffering, like that experienced by millions of Cubans every night without electricity, without food, and with no other sound than the clanging of a pot.
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