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Zea Gisselle, a resident of the Zamora neighborhood in the Marianao municipality, Havana, shared a heartbreaking testimony on Facebook on July 6 about the crisis faced by her community: 38 consecutive hours without electricity, an entire week without drinking water, and the tears of helplessness as she watched her neighbors unable to fill a single tank.
The report arrived on the same day when Cuba experienced its third total nationwide blackout of the year, when the National Electrical System collapsed at 12:17 PM after the shutdown of unit No. 6 at the thermoelectric plant in Nuevitas, Camagüey, leaving approximately 9.6 million people without electricity.
"Tired. Thirsty and hungry... above all, for JUSTICE," wrote Zea Gisselle at the beginning of her post, before detailing precisely each hour of a day she described as a " Stations of the Cross."
The woman had gone three water cycles without supply—equivalent to seven days, since the service comes on alternate days in her area—when the electricity was restored at 5:15 pm on Sunday.
Water started to flow into the pipes 15 minutes later, but without pressure or volume. At 6:15 PM, the blackout returned, interrupting the filling just as the neighbors were beginning.
At 6:30 pm, the electricity returned, but the water pressure was dwindling. Zea Gisselle managed to fill her own tanks with a pump and dedicated herself to helping her neighbors. At 8:00 pm, a new and final blackout hit: without electricity and without water, more than half of her block and neighborhood were left unable to store even a drop.
"I broke down in tears, out of helplessness," she wrote.
His complaint points directly to the regime: "This is criminal! It's a crime to keep the people without electricity, without gas, without water. Damn it, without water!"
He directed his words to Aguas de La Habana, the Electric Company of Havana, and the Government of Havana, warning them that "the only thing they are achieving is that these marginalized, forgotten, and silenced neighborhoods will end up accumulating so much rage, so much anger, so much helplessness... that one day they could easily become a Myanmar."
The crisis described is not new in Zamora. On June 5, neighbors from the same neighborhood staged pot-banging protests with slogans for "water and electricity" after six consecutive days of 21-hour blackouts. And on June 1, Zea herself reported the arrest of her neighbor Yansis Valladares, who was arrested for asking for food for her son.
Eighty-seven percent of Havana's water supply system depends on the electrical grid, which turns every blackout into an immediate water crisis. Nationally, 2.7 million Cubans suffer from water shortages; in the capital, over 376,000 people lack regular access to supply.
Zea Gisselle also described the nighttime presence of patrols, operational technique trucks, and troops at the intersection of 124 and 35 streets, watching over a weary neighborhood that no longer has the strength to protest. "Be a bit more of the people and less of the enforcers," she wrote to the uniformed officers before concluding, "THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE IS THE STATE."
The Cuban Observatory of Conflicts recorded 1,245 protests in March, the highest monthly figure since July 11, and 107 street protests in June, a historic record. In that same month, Cubalex documented at least 38 arrests related to pot-banging protests, including six minors.
Zea Gisselle concluded her post with a phrase that links the crisis of basic services to political repression: «ONLY 3 DAYS LEFT FOR LUISMA'S FREEDOM!», referring to the artist and activist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, whose five-year sentence was set to expire on July 9.
However, the regime took him out of the Guanajay prison on Monday during an operation and his whereabouts are now unknown; activist Anamely Ramos confirmed that "he is currently missing."
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