Hundreds of people took to the streets of western Pinar del Río, Cuba, on Thursday night to protest routine blackouts that have made life impossible for much of the island – the same night a separate crowd formed in Havana after a homeless woman and her daughters reportedly blocked traffic to protest their eviction.
The emergence of renewed protests on the island follows the anniversary of nearly 200,000 protesters across every municipality on the island calling for the end of communism in a historic event on July 11, 2021, which preceded an incessant wave of dissident activity on the island since. While no single day of protest has attracted the sheer number of people that took the streets on July 11, significant protests have continued throughout the year, most prominently the Christian clergy-led protests in November. Dissident movements have also notably soured the communist regime’s attempts at celebrating its own holidays, most prominently the failure of the typically effusive May Day celebrations this year.
The protests on Thursday served as an indication that Cubans’ resolve to oust the communist Castro dynasty has not ebbed in the face of tremendous persecution, including the mass arrests, beatings, and torture of civilians including children.
In Havana, local reports indicated that a protest began on Thursday night when an unnamed mother and her two daughters, one of whom appeared to be confined to a wheelchair, decided to block traffic in front of the official headquarters of the local government of Central Havana, asserting that she no longer had anywhere to live and the regime had offered her and her children no recourse. Videos of the scene appear to show that she used her belongings, including apparently a mattress of some sort, to help her block traffic in the heart of the capital city.
As Cuba is a communist regime, the entire island is the property of the Castro family and private property ownership does not in practice exist.
Videos began surfacing on social media of the woman’s protest later as local residents began joining her in solidarity in response to state security officials surrounding her. The woman has not been identified at press time.
The Havana incident appeared to have subsided by 2:50 a.m. local time, according to the independent news outlet Cubanet. The mother’s whereabouts and those of her daughters remain unclear at press time; Cubanet reported a heavy police presence at the scene as of Friday.
In Pinar del Río, Cuba’s westernmost province, a separate and apparently much larger protest erupted in response to yet another day of rolling blackouts making it impossible for Cubans to go about their cooking and other necessary tasks. In Los Palacios municipality, Cubans began convening on the streets, banging pots and pans and shouting, “down with the regime!” and other anti-communist slogans.
The U.S.-based Cuban news outlet Martí Noticias reported protesters shouting, among other things, “we are hungry,” “put the electricity on, goddamn it,” and “down with communism!”
Cubanet estimated that the Pinar del Río protest attracted “hundreds” of people, who attempted to march to the local headquarters of the Communist Party of Cuba in the middle of the night.
The Castro regime appeared to cut access to the internet islandwide as the protests in both provinces began to swell – the same tactic the communists used to attempt to prevent videos of the July 11 protests from leaving the island and attracting the attention of the international community. That attempt failed, as anti-communist groups convened around the world demanding respect for the human rights of the Cuban people and the anti-communist cause became a rallying cry for Latin American celebrities.
Daily blackouts have become a common occurrence throughout much of Cuba in the past month, the Argentine media outlet Infobae detailed on Friday. The Communist Party has not made any significant attempt to answer the demands of the people for consistent access to electricity and cooking gas; this week, the Cuban Electric Union, which maintains the power grid, predicted that as much as 19 percent of the grid could fail to supply electricity during peak hours and that much of the island could simply lose access to electricity for must of the night, according to Infobae.
Communist mismanagement of the deteriorating power grid is largely to blame for the failures, just as the Castro regime’s destruction of the agriculture sector and total control of the tourist industry has kept the people impoverished for 63 years. International factors like Western attempts to boycott Russian oil and natural gas supplies, rising inflation, and supply chain problems arising from Chinese coronavirus lockdowns have greatly exacerbated the problem, however, in Cuba as they have in other socialist countries. Cubans are experiencing similar dramatic shortages of natural gas – for use in cooking and personal generators, the latter becoming increasingly vital as the power grid fails – as Nigerians and Sri Lankans.
The situation in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, where protesters overran the president’s palace this weekend and forced him, now former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, out of the country, has attracted a great deal of attention among Cuban dissidents, Cuban journalist Yoani Sánchez wrote in her independent publication, 14 y medio, this week. Cubans have begun greeting each other, she narrates, with slogans like “don’t forget Sri Lanka,” “see you in Sri Lanka,” or “see you at the pool,” the latter a reference to the pool party protesters threw when taking over the presidential palace.
Protestors demanding the resignation of Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa swim in a pool inside the compound of Sri Lanka’s Presidential Palace in Colombo on July 9, 2022. (AFP)
“Sri Lanka has been assumed as a dreamed-of mirror, as a symbol of the power of the people when they unite and also as a verbal joke to warn the olive-green rulers that no palace full of comforts is safe when civil wrath overflows,” Sánchez concluded, referring to the preferred faux-military uniforms of the Castro family. “Not even the water in the presidential pool is enough to quell the discomfort accumulated throughout decades nor do the regal beds, with their soft pillows, suffice to calm a massive protest.”