At least six neighborhoods in Havana, Cuba, erupted in anti-communist protests between Monday night and Tuesday morning, featuring residents shouting “down with communism!” and “freedom!” while confronting the Castro regime’s repressive forces.
The protests, multiple independent Cuban news outlets reported, began after the capital city experienced a 15-hour blackout, an increasingly common occurrence nationwide, though the Castro regime had previously succeeded in saving the capital city from power grid failure. Tourism is one of the Communist Party’s most lucrative industries, at its peak raking in billions of dollars for the regime — and making the preservation of reasonable access to electricity pivotal for Havana, the city most commonly visited by tourists. The decades of neglect of the nation’s power grid and lack of investment in any of the country’s infrastructure has caught up with Havana, however, sending tourism revenue plunging.
The blackouts are part of a greater societal collapse in Cuba that began with the post-Soviet “special period” of the 1990s and has continued in a steady decline, leaving Cubans with deadly, crumbling architecture, no functional healthcare system, minimal access to protein (only through the largess of the United States), and increasing difficulties in accessing clean water, cleaning supplies, and other needs. Cuban have organized protests for decades, though they most attracted international attention when tens of thousands of people took the streets of the country on July 11, 2021.
In the aftermath of those protests, and the violent repression the Castro regime enacted after them, protests against the regime have increased in frequency, outside the attention of the world’s legacy media.
The protests on Monday and Tuesday saw large numbers of people flood the streets of their Havana neighborhoods in the dark; no estimates of how many people participated are available at press time, made difficult by the total darkness in the blackout. According to the independent outlet Cubanet, the neighborhoods of Marianao, Regla, Alamar, Diez de Octubre, San Miguel del Padrón, and La Lisa experienced protests, consisting primarily of residents banging pots and pans and chanting anti-communist slogans. The outlet also reported residents building bonfires in the streets and using what remained of their cell phone batteries to light up the neighborhoods.
Videos compiled by the Spain-based outlet Diario de Cuba and apparently taken by local residents show large fires and appear to show clashes with police. In one video, the person filming shouts that the protesters are throwing glass bottles at police.
Warning — video features profanity throughout:
In one neighborhood, Diez de Octubre, the local Catholic Church joined the protests by ringing its bells loudly to the beat of the protesters’ pots and pans.
In the neighborhood of Marianao, Cubanet reported, citing local journalists, repressive state security responded to the protests, arriving and trying to wrangle the protesters back into their homes. One journalist, José Raúl Gallego, remarked on social media that regime thugs appeared to be making only a half-hearted effort to confront the protesters: “They don’t want to get hit for no reason, either, while they go through the same hunger and needs that are on the other side.”
The protesters can be heard in various videos shouting “freedom!” “down with communism!” “down with the Castros!” and “down with [figurehead President Miguel] Díaz-Canel!” among other slogans.
The Castro regime has been forced to publicly acknowledge the lack of electricity in the country and general decay, though it has consistently blamed this situation, falsely, on the United States. On Monday, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, Granma, published a story describing the country’s power grid as “complex,” blaming it on “a convergence of factors, among them the lack of fuel and low availability due to the absence of generators.” The article promised a dramatic expansion of solar energy “in the long term.”
Elsewhere on its front page on Tuesday, Granma boasted of digitalizing “over 37 million files at the Civil Registry,” a bizarre feat for a country suffering from rolling nationwide blackouts.
Protests have escalated dramatically in the country throughout the past year. In November, the Cuban Observatory of Conflict, a non-governmental organization, documented the highest number of individual protests in the country on record: 1,326 separate instances of civil protest in the month. This was an increase of nearly 100 incidents compared to October and over 300 more than in August.
Communist repression has increased commensurate with the rise in protests. On Tuesday, Prisoners Defenders, a human rights organization that monitors the Cuban government, revealed that it had documented the verified existence of 1,192 political prisoners in the Cuban penal system as of the end of November, adding 19 new cases to October’s tally.
“Repression in Cuba continues to increase as a mechanism sustained by the regime to obscure the ocean of political, social, and sanitary crises,” Prisoners Defenders explained, “and the citizens’ desperation.”
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