Residents of Vedado, in Havana, staged a daytime kettle protest this Sunday, which was documented in a video by the activist Salomé García Bacallao, who posted the images on her Facebook account with the message: "July 12. The kettle protests continue to rise in Vedado."
The word "continue" in García Bacallao's publication reveals that the protests did not start on that Sunday: the banging of pots and pans spread throughout the previous night and extended into the daylight hours, turning Vedado into one of the epicenters of a day of outrage that impacted several neighborhoods in the capital.
The journalist and activist Magdiel Jorge Castro amplified the video on the social network X and described what happened as a "cacerolazo during the day in Vedado, Havana... this after another night of protests in the capital," adding that "11J sparked the flame and something changed forever in Cuba."
The protests this Sunday come just a day after the fifth anniversary of July 11, 2021, the largest popular mobilization in Cuba since 1959.
On Saturday, pot-banging protests were reported in Old Havana, where the regime deployed police and paramilitary forces at the municipal headquarters of the Communist Party, and astrong pot-banging protest in the Nalón neighborhood of Guanabacoa followed over 33 consecutive hours of blackout.
El Vedado is not a new setting for this type of protest. Throughout 2026, protests featuring pots and pans have been documented in this neighborhood on multiple dates, including March 13 and 23, April 17, June 3 and 19, and July 2.
The wave of protests occurs in a context of extreme crisis. In June 2026 alone, there were 107 protests reported across the country, nearly double the previous record, with 82 of them concentrated in Havana.
Power outages last up to 72 consecutive hours in some areas, the informal dollar is trading at 670 pesos, and the Gross Domestic Product is contracting between 6.5% and 15%.
While the neighbors were banging their pots and pans, Berta Soler and the Ladies in White reported that State Security agents surrounded their homes to prevent any commemoration of the 11J anniversary.
Five years after those historic protests, 338 people who participated in them remain imprisoned, excluded from the pardon of April 2026, in a country that records between 1,260 and 1,306 political prisoners, the highest number ever documented.
In that same context, Amnesty International described it as a forced disappearance regarding the situation of the artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, who was taken from the Guanajay prison by State Security on July 7 without notification to his family, despite the fact that his sentence ended on July 9.
The UN Committee against Enforced Disappearance has activated an urgent action and set July 25 as the deadline for the regime to report on the individual's whereabouts.
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