Residents of Avenida Carlos III, in Centro Habana, staged a pot-banging protest on Friday night against the prolonged blackouts that are suffocating the Cuban capital, according to a video posted by independent journalist Yosmany Mayeta Labrada on his Facebook profile.
The images, captured in the darkness, show silhouettes of people in the street while the banging of pots and pans can be heard, a form of protest that has spread across multiple neighborhoods in Havana and other Cuban provinces throughout June 2026.
The cacerolazo on Carlos III was not an isolated incident this evening. A crowd gathered on Escobar and San Leopoldo streets, also in Centro Habana, and cacerolazos were reported just a few blocks from the Communist Party headquarters in Santiago de Cuba.
In the Havana municipality of Santos Suárez, the streets burned tonight as residents continued their protest against the electricity crisis.
The direct cause of the outrage is an unprecedented energy crisis: blackouts in Havana have reached between 12 and 22 hours daily, with some neighborhoods reporting outages of up to 31 consecutive hours.
The situation worsened after the shutdown of the Antonio Guiteras Thermoelectric Power Station. In Santiago de Cuba, the Electric Company reorganized the power cuts into nine blocks, leaving each area with only one or two hours of electricity per day.
The protesters have chanted slogans such as "water and electricity" and "down with the dictatorship," while the regime responds with a deployment of police forces, including the so-called black berets, and with arrests reported since at least March 6, 2026.
This wave of protests began in early June. On June 2, clanging pots and pans were reported in several municipalities of Havana, and the following day, coinciding with Raúl Castro's birthday, pots were heard in Monte and Águila, in Holguín and Villa Clara.
On June 17, pot-banging, blocked streets, and burning trash marked the night in several neighborhoods of the capital, as documented by El Toque. On June 18, a neighborhood in Havana erupted in protest after 36 hours without electricity, and new pot-banging protests shook Santiago de Cuba.
Journalist Mario J. Pentón noted on Facebook that "between June 18 and 19, multiple spontaneous protests were reported in various locations" across the country, a description that captures the magnitude of what is happening in Cuba this week.
Independent media agree in labeling this wave as the largest surge of popular protests in Cuba since July 11, 2021, when thousands of Cubans took to the streets in dozens of cities and the regime responded with a massive crackdown that left hundreds of political prisoners.
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