Residents of Dolores Street, in the Lawton neighborhood of the capital municipality of Diez de Octubre, held a pot-banging demonstration and burned trash in the public street on Friday night, in a protest that spread across several points of that street due to the prolonged blackouts that are suffocating the area.
The journalist José Raúl Gallego shared a video on Facebook that shows intense fire on the road, thick smoke, and blue lights from emergency or police vehicles, recorded approximately half an hour before its publication.
At the same time that the neighbors were protesting, a witness informed Gallego that he saw a group of military and police vehicles, popularly known as "el combo," moving along Calzada de Diez de Octubre towards Dolores Street, coming from the command post located in the Santos Suárez park.
Those vehicles transport police and special forces officers whose role is to suppress demonstrations and arrest participants.
Lawton has a recent history of conflict due to the energy crisis. In March, its residents had already set streets on fire and burned garbage after 36 hours without electricity, and on July 8th, during the fourth total blackout of the year, two poles fell in the neighborhood.
The protest this Friday is not an isolated event. On this very day, residents of El Vedado took to the streets after more than 30 consecutive hours without electricity,
On Thursday, residents in the neighborhood of San Isidro, in Old Havana, protested after four days without electricity and five without water.
"Four days without electricity, five days without water; those dogs are a real problem for the street below," expressed a neighbor from San Isidro in a video shared on social media.
Habaneros describe cuts that exceed any tolerable limit and demand that the situation be resolved once and for all.
The backdrop is the worst energy crisis in Cuba in decades. The National Electric System experienced its fifth total collapse of the year on Monday, July 14, due to the unexpected breakdown of a unit at the Felton thermoelectric plant.
June witnessed 107 street protests in Cuba, a historic record, with 82 concentrated in Havana, according to data documented by independent analysts.
This Friday, an official slide accidentally projected during a morning program on state television revealed the true objective of the recent meetings held by the ruling Miguel Díaz-Canel with the Defense Councils, related to "actions in the political, economic, social, and communication fields to prevent a social outburst".
The protests in Lawton, El Vedado, and San Isidro are taking place against the backdrop of the fifth anniversary of July 11, 2021, at a time when the regime itself acknowledges internally that the risk of an uncontrollable social explosion is real.
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