The pressure from the residents of the El Condado neighborhood in Santa Clara worked: after blocking streets and raising barricades on Monday night, a technical crew from the Electric Company arrived at the site and repaired the transformer that had left several blocks without power for nearly 36 hours, according to a report by Martí Noticias.
The protest, which began with about 20 demonstrators on Estrada Palma Street and grew to more than fifty people, was the culmination of days of accumulated frustration: the transformer had already been reported to the state-owned company, which had sent a crew without resolving the issue.
They created a mess and immediately came to fix the transformer, summarized Arnoldo Goicuña, a local resident, while describing how the protest expedited the authorities' response.
The political prisoner Liván Hernández Sosa, a resident of the community, explained the situation that triggered the outburst: “A transformer was having issues; it had already been reported and the truck [from the Electric Company] had come, but they didn’t resolve the problem. When they provided electricity to the other people, during the two hours they were supplying, it didn’t reach them due to the equipment failure.”
The activist Guillermo del Sol confirmed that the mobilization quickly spread throughout the area: “It started in front of La Latina, but it soon became widespread. It was large. Many people sat on the sidewalks and set objects on fire.”
There was police presence during the protest, but Hernández Sosa stated he had no information about any arrests.
Despite the restoration of the service, distrust among residents persists. Hernández Sosa himself warned that "this repair will last a week, at most," referring to the fragility of an infrastructure that has accumulated months of deterioration without a structural solution.
On social media, residents reported that El Condado has been without electricity during the day for five months, and the constant on-and-off power supply is damaging appliances. "No business can progress," wrote one of them.
What happened in El Condado follows a pattern seen throughout Cuba: neighborhood protests as the only effective mechanism to elicit a response from the State, even if it is only temporary.
In El Fanguito, Havana, the regime restored electricity hours after neighbors blocked Avenida 23 after 48 hours without light, water, or gas, although State Security arrested two mothers linked to that protest. In Regla, authorities sent a water truck following a similar mobilization.
The neighborhood has direct precedents: in June, its residents participated in protests with pots and pans over power outages of up to 20 hours a day, and the activist Andy García Lorenzo was arrested on August 30 for recording footage of those protests in public.
The episode occurs days after the eighth total shutdown of the National Electric System of the year, recorded on September 18. According to the Cuban Conflict Observatory, July 2026 marked a historical record with 1,415 protests, complaints, and critical expressions. According to the Observatory, these figures position 2026 as the year with the highest number of protests since 11J of 2021.
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