"We want at least three hours of light: Cubans to Granma leader"

While the province of Granma endures power outages of up to 48 consecutive hours, the first secretary of the Communist Party in the area, Yudelkis Ortiz, posted a note on Facebook this week celebrating the arrival of mobile cinema to the community of El Dátil in Bayamo, as a response to the energy crisis affecting its residents.

The post, featuring the official hashtags #GranmaConmigoCuenta and #ProvinciaGranma, describes the two-hour outdoor screening as "a simple and powerful relief, a different light," and bluntly acknowledges that "it is not the solution our people deserve." The leader herself admits that "the lack of electricity weighs heavily, causes pain, and takes a toll," but frames the cultural activity as a gesture of hope.

The citizens' response was immediate and resounding: Cubans directly demanded that what they need is not a projector in a park, but electricity. The complaint is summed up in a phrase circulating among the residents of the province: "We want at least three hours of power."

That aspiration, which would sound modest in any other context, reflects the magnitude of the energy collapse in eastern Cuba.

In Granma, some circuits have remained without electricity for 45 to 48 consecutive hours. In Santiago de Cuba, the electric company reorganized the outages into nine blocks, providing each area with only one or two hours of service per day.

Nationally, the situation is no better. The Electric Union reported this Thursday a deficit exceeding 2,000 MW against a demand of 3,050 MW, with blackouts affecting 65% of the country.

In Havana, power cuts reached 22 hours a day, and residents of the Diez de Octubre municipality reported that on Wednesday they only had 20 minutes of electricity service throughout the entire day.

The regime's management in Granma in the face of the crisis has generated sustained criticism. On June 5, the Bayamo government mobilized fighters from the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution to "explain" the blackouts to the population under the "Barrio por la Patria" program. Days later, Ortiz herself presented as "humanism" the fact that neighbors were cooking in the street due to lack of electricity.

Four solar parks installed in the province have also failed to alleviate the situation: according to a report, intermittent issues and failures in the thermoelectric plants keep power outages above 30 hours in several circuits.

This Friday, Cubans on the island erupted on social media with pot-banging and protests in various neighborhoods across the country, on a day marked by desperation due to the endless power outages.

The scene of the mobile cinema at El Dátil—dozens of children sitting on folding chairs watching a screen in the darkness of the neighborhood—accurately encapsulates the paradox of the moment: a province that receives projectors instead of electrical power, while its leaders celebrate "turning on a projector in a park" as "a way to bring light."