Cuba: Hundreds of citizens go out to protest due to lack of light

Recently it was realized that bread was added to the basics that are in short supply in Cuba. Now there is one more problem, the long blackouts that affect the entire country and that in Santiago de Cuba last up to 13 hours a day.

Hundreds of people today took to the streets in Santiago de Cuba this Sunday, after a difficult weekend without electricity. The protest “was happening until a while ago” on Trocha Avenue, a populous area of ​​this city in the east of the island, a 65-year-old Santiago resident who lives a few blocks away and who has requested not be identified.

“People shouted ‘food and current,’ said the man who said he arrived at the rally, the first Secretary of the Communist Party in the province, Beatriz Johnson Urrutia.

While trying to speak, the population, which has suffered 13 and 14 hour blackouts in recent days, shouted “We don’t want teeth! (expletives).”

Later the electricity returned and “two trucks with rice arrived for the warehouses because they have not sold a single pound this month,” the man explained about the food that the Cuban government delivers monthly to each inhabitant at a subsidized price.

From mid-afternoon the networks were filled with images of the protest, which stopped later. Several people confirmed to AFP that cell phone data service in the city was suspended.

Since the beginning of March, Cuba has faced a new series of outages due to maintenance work carried out at the Antonio Güiteras thermoelectric plant, the most important on the island and located in the central province of Matanzas.

This weekend the problem worsened due to the fuel shortage in the country. The energy is necessary to power the other thermoelectric plants.

Cuban authorities reported on Saturday that the country was “completely affected” by the blackouts, including the capital, without reaching a widespread power outage.

“There are regions where there is a blackout throughout the entire morning and practically all day and practically throughout the country,” the Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, said on state television on Saturday night.

In 2023, the island had recovered from the daily blackouts that it experienced almost all of 2022 and that caused outbreaks of social protest on the island. This Sunday is the largest that has occurred since then.

The most critical thing occurred in October of that year, after a widespread blackout on the night of September 27, when Hurricane Ian hit the west of the country.

Cuba’s electric power generation system consists of eight old thermoelectric plants, as well as generators and eight floating plants that the government rents to Turkey, also affected by a lack of diesel for their operation.