Residents of the D'Beche neighborhood in the Havana municipality of Guanabacoa staged a large-scale pot-banging demonstration this Friday amidst complete darkness.
Reports on social media indicated that the community has gone five consecutive days without electricity due to a double transformer failure that left the neighborhood completely dark.
The trigger was the explosion of the transformer in the area. The Electric Company installed a replacement unit, but this also burst shortly after restoring service, leaving the residents with no immediate hope of a solution.
«We can't take it anymore. They give us two hours of electricity and thirty hours of blackout. This is not life. We can't endure it any longer. What we are experiencing is inhumane. There are sick children and elderly people here,» several residents of the neighborhood reported, according to the profile La Tijera, which shared a video of the protest led by the neighbors.
The protest in D'Beche is not an isolated incident.
Guanabacoa has become one of the most active centers of popular resistance in Havana during 2026, with an unbroken chain of protest gatherings: Las Minas in March, Calzada Vieja in May, La Hata on July 8, the Nalón neighborhood on July 11, and Loma de la Pela in mid-July, where the presence of State Security agents was reported.
The national context further exacerbates the situation. On July 29, 74% of the country lost power simultaneously, the highest level recorded since energy statistics began to be published in 2022.
In July, at least three total collapses of the National Electric System occurred on the 6th, 10th, and 14th of the month.
The Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, appeared before the National Assembly on Thursday and acknowledged that there are communities with up to 105 consecutive days without electricity, attributing the prolonged outages to the deterioration of transformers and obsolete voltage circuits.
The minister also admitted that the solution to the blackouts "does not have a short path" and that the system lacks sufficient fuel to stabilize, in a confession that contrasts with the despair expressed by the neighbors on the streets.
The regime's response to the protests has followed a systematic pattern of repression. The organization Cubalex documented 38 arrests related to pot-banging protests alone in June 2026, including six minors, and 319 repressive events that month throughout Cuba.
While the government does not provide concrete solutions, the residents of D'Beche continue to bang their pots in the darkness, joining a wave of protests that shows no signs of stopping.
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