Residents of La Hata, in the Havana municipality of Guanabacoa, held a pot-banging protest this Tuesday in the area where families relocated from shelters live alongside buildings used for military purposes, according to an audio sent from the site and shared on Facebook by José Raúl Gallego.
The protest occurs as Cuba faces nearly 24 hours of a total blackout following the complete collapse of the National Electric System that happened on Monday at 12:17 PM, marking the seventh nationwide outage in 18 months and the third so far in 2026.
The trigger for the collapse was the shutdown of Unit No. 6 at the Nuevitas thermal power plant in Camagüey, which left the country with only between 935 and 1,000 megawatts available against a demand of 3,100 megawatts, resulting in a deficit of over 2,200 megawatts.
The situation worsened this Tuesday with a new malfunction at the Victoria de Girón substation, which caused the additional shutdown of the Renté 3 and Felton 1 units, while 106 distributed generation plants remained inactive due to a lack of fuel, according to the Electric Union.
The outages have reached 87 consecutive hours in Matanzas, 72 hours in Granma, and up to 35 hours daily in Havana, where Guanabacoa is one of the municipalities with the highest history of protests in the 2024-2026 cycle.
La Hata —also written as La Jata— is a residential neighborhood where the differences between the blocks are evident: the military buildings feature tiles, ceramic tiles, gardens, and street lighting, while the homes of families relocated from shelters have cracked cement floors.
Guanabacoa had already recorded pot-banging protests on Calzada Vieja in May 2026 and in Minas-Barreras in November 2024, making this municipality one of the most persistent centers of discontent in the capital.
The explosion on Tuesday is part of a wave of protests sweeping across the Island. The organization Cubalex documented 109 demonstrations in June 2026, a historic record that nearly doubles the previous maximum, with at least 38 arrests linked to the pot-banging protests, among them six minors.
Days earlier, Miguel Díaz-Canel had sparked outrage by suggesting that Cubans should direct their pot-banging protests against the United States government instead of the Cuban government, a statement that the citizens themselves rejected with new protests in various locations across the country.
The regime responded to the protests from previous days with militarization of key areas, the deployment of armed black berets in Santiago de Cuba, and police operations that included internet outages in neighborhoods of Havana such as El Cerro, El Vedado, La Lisa, and Regla.
Filed under: