Residents of Santa Rita, a locality in the municipality of Jiguaní in the province of Granma, led a street protest this Saturday against power outages and the decline in living conditions, according to videos shared on Facebook that garnered tens of thousands of views in just a few hours.
The images show the neighbors chanting "We want electricity!" and "The people united will never be defeated!" as a police patrol passed through the demonstration without managing to disperse it.
The protest occurs a day after Holguín, Granma, Santiago de Cuba, and Guantánamo were disconnected from the national grid due to a fluctuation in the transmission lines, according to reports from Friday.
The electrical situation in eastern Cuba is critical. For this Saturday, the maximum expected impact nationwide is 2,072 MW with only 758 MW of available generation and five generating units out of service.
Jiguaní is well acquainted with that ordeal: in June, it experienced nearly 49 consecutive hours without electricity, and some circuits in Granma reported outages lasting up to 72 hours in a row. Residents of the province stated at that time that they were asking for "at least three hours of light."
The province has experienced multiple total outages throughout the year. A failure in the 220 kV Nuevitas–Las Tunas left the eastern part of Cuba without service in mid-October, and on June 23, a breakdown in the Renté–Santiago line had plunged all of Granma into darkness.
What happened in Santa Rita is not an isolated incident. At the beginning of October, residents of Cabañas, in Mariel (Artemisa), took to the streets for the second time in less than four days for the same reasons. The slogan "We want electricity!" had already echoed in June in front of the Municipal Government of Regla, in Havana.
The pattern repeats: a police presence that fails to stop the protesters, accumulated frustration, and a crisis that the regime has been unable to resolve.
According to data from Cubalex, during the first half of 2026, there were 766 protests recorded in 141 municipalities across the country, with a record of 253 in June alone and 31 in a single day. The wave of indignation shows no signs of waning.
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