Foreign students residing in the dormitories of the Faculty of Medicine in Santiago de Cuba staged a pot-banging protest this Saturday after enduring over 24 hours without electricity, and the power supply was restored just minutes after the protest began.
The incident was reported by the independent journalist Yosmany Mayeta Labrada, who received videos and testimonies from local residents. According to those reports, the power was restored to the university almost immediately, but the homes in the surrounding area remained without electricity.
During the clanging of pots and pans, slogans of "Down with Batista!" were also heard, a phrase with a deliberate historical significance that, according to various people consulted by Mayeta, serves as a code to express dissatisfaction with the current government without directly naming it.
As of the time of the report, the regime had not issued any official statement regarding the blackout or its causes.
The episode follows a documented pattern in Santiago de Cuba during 2026, where in response to the pot-banging protests, authorities briefly restore electricity to calm the demonstrations while deploying police and military forces in the affected neighborhoods.
The electrical crisis in the eastern city is one of the most severe in decades. Since June 16, the local Electric Company has reorganized power outages into nine blocks, leaving each area with only one or two hours of electricity per day.
The Antonio Guiteras Thermoelectric Power Plant, the largest in the country, has reported 17 breakdowns so far this year, and the national generation deficit reached a record 2,208 MW on June 25, leaving 70% of the island without electricity.
On Friday night, new protests with pots and pans erupted in Santiago in the Municipal, Santa Úrsula, and Hoyo de Chicharrones neighborhoods, just hours before the protest at the faculty.
The participation of foreign students adds a politically sensitive dimension to the conflict. Since March, foreign students - including Jamaicans - have reported the conditions in the dormitories, with constant power outages, food shortages, and lack of water.
Cuba markets the training of foreign doctors as a source of income, making any protests led by these students a public relations issue for the regime.
In June, the organization Cubalex documented at least 38 arrests related to protests over blackouts across the country, including six minors.
That same month, 107 protests were recorded in Cuba, with Havana leading the way, according to data gathered by monitoring organizations.
On June 18, the Electric Company of Santiago itself admitted that it could not guarantee even two hours of daily electric service, a confession that sparked a new wave of protests that occurred just a few blocks from the provincial headquarters of the Communist Party.
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