Days after Hurricane Ian ravaged Cuba, residents of the island still don’t have power, and they’re fed up. For the past two nights, Cubans have taken to the streets to protest the lack of power and the Communist regime’s slow response to it.
On top of the blackouts, the Cuban regime has shut down internet service throughout the island, adding to the anger and frustration that the Cuban people are experiencing.
Protesters have gathered outdoors, banging pots and pans, burning tires and garbage, and even blocking streets for two nights. Cuba’s entire power grid went offline Tuesday night as Ian bore down, and, while some of Havana’s power was back up by Friday night, much of the island still went without electricity.
The Associated Press spoke with individual protesters to find out what drove the demonstrations:
Masiel Pereira, a housewife, said that “the only thing I ask is that they restore the current for my children.”
A neighbor, Yunior Velásquez, lamented that “all the food is about to be lost” because there was no power for refrigerators.
Reuters interviewed some residents as well:
Jorge Luis Cruz of Havana’s El Cerro neighborhood stood shirtless in his doorway late on Thursday banging a pot and shouting in anger. Dozens of other people could be heard banging pots in the darkness from terraces and rooftops nearby.
“This isn’t working: Enough of this,” Cruz told Reuters. “All my food is rotten. Why? Because we don’t have electricity.”
Cruz said his family did not want him to take to the street out of fear he would be hauled off to jail.
“Let them take me,” he said.
The regime remains mum on how many households have had power restored, but authorities said that portions of Havana had power restored.
“Havana today has more than 50% of its grid recovered, and about 60% of customers have electricity,” Cuba’s Communist Party leader Luis Antonio Torres said on state TV.
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The government also restored internet and phone service Friday morning but shut it back down as the evening approached.
“Internet service has been interrupted once again in Cuba, at about the same time as yesterday (Thursday),” Alp Toker, director of internet-monitoring organization Netblocks, told the AP. “The timing of the outages provides another indication that these are a measure to suppress coverage of the protests.”
Similar protests took place over the island in the summer of 2021 as Cuba’s fragile power grid struggled to keep pace. The island nation has 13 power plants of its own along with five floating power plants that it has rented from Turkey for the past three years. The government has done a poor job of maintaining the plants, but it blames U.S. sanctions and a general lack of money for its mismanagement of the country’s power grid.
Torres condemned the protests.
“I believe that protesting is a right, but only when those responsible are not doing their jobs,” he said. “Yesterday´s protests, instead of helping, slowed down our mission.”
That doesn’t matter to a populace who barely gets by under optimal circumstances.
“We still don’t have light, and no one tells us why,” resident Tiare Rodriguez told Reuters. “Our food is going to waste. Our children’s milk has been lost. Who will replace it? No one.”
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