A video shared on social media shows a nighttime protest in "El Hueco," a neighborhood located on the borders of the municipalities of La Lisa and Marianao in Havana, after more than 36 consecutive hours without electricity.
In the images recorded this week, a fire can be seen in the street along with silhouettes of people in the background, while a woman shouts slogans of desperation and frustration against the regime.
"We are already tired of so much hunger, so much misery, and so much darkness. We have been without light for 36 hours. How much longer, how much longer?" is heard shouting the woman who is filming the scene.
The protester also denounces that mothers and children are going without food, that there is no water, and demands the government's departure: "They should leave! What we want is for them to go away and leave us in peace, so we can try to live our lives."
One of the most striking points made in the video directly accuses the state electric company of lying about the duration of the outage.
"The electricity company is the first to say that we've only been without power for two hours; we have actually been without electricity for 36 hours. This is enough already, what a tremendous lack of respect," the woman states.
The protest in El Hueco is not an isolated incident
The same night from Wednesday to Thursday, massive pot-banging protests shook all the neighborhoods of Santiago de Cuba, accompanied by the militarization of the streets. Protests were also reported in Buena Vista and other neighborhoods in Havana.
The electrical collapse that triggers these protests has structural roots. On June 15, the Antonio Guiteras Thermoelectric Power Plant went out of service due to a leak in the boiler, marking its 15th breakdown this year, raising the projected impact for the nighttime peak to 2,085 MW compared to a mere availability of 995 MW and a national demand of 3,100 MW.
In Santiago de Cuba, the electric company reorganized the power outages into nine blocks, leaving each area with barely one or two hours of electricity per day. In Havana, the blackouts ranged from 12 to 22 hours daily.
La Lisa and Marianao have a history of protests over power outages
On June 5, neighbors from Marianao staged pot-banging protests with slogans of "water and electricity," and in March 2026, during the blackout that left 68% of the island without power, both municipalities had already taken to the streets.
The protests in June took place alongside the Extraordinary Plenary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, held on Wednesday, where the regime discussed more than 20 economic reforms while people took to the streets in several provinces.
"It's been 36 hours without electricity. This is an injustice!" the woman from El Hueco repeated. She ended her video with a question that encapsulates the exhaustion of thousands of Cubans: "How much longer is this going to last?"
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