Maritza González's two young children have not known, for a long time, what it is like to sleep until dawn.
In her house in Morón, in the Cuban province of Ciego de Ávila, Maritza manages, she shakes off the mosquitoes, fans them with a piece of cardboard, but her two small children have a hard time closing their eyes. .
“They can't sleep because the power goes out every three or four hours,” she says.
And if there is no electricity, you cannot connect the fan or air conditioning either.
“You have to blow air into them with a piece of cardboard, and you are also a human being and you get tired of being at this all day.”
For several weeks now, the Cuban Electrical Union has been reporting on the constant cuts of electricity service on the island, which, added to the food crisis that is hitting the country, unleashed massive protests on Sunday, March 17, that have once again put in check to the Government of Miguel Díaz-Canel.
The street mobilization, which began in a neighborhood of the city of Santiago de Cuba around two in the afternoon, by Sunday night had multiplied in other provinces of the country such as Matanzas or Artemisa.
If the first demands were for “current” and “food,” then the protesters shouted “Freedom” and directly booed the current president.
The Government cut off the Internet to prevent the events from being reported or spreading to other areas of the country, but several managed to share the images where hundreds of people also shouted in chorus the phrase “Patria y Vida”, which has become an anthem of the protests.
Although other demonstrations of discontent have been reported on the island, these are the largest since those of July 11 and 12, 2021, when thousands of Cubans took to the streets for the same reasons.
Despite the Government's warning against previous protests, which some have paid with sentences of up to 20 years in prison, the economic situation once again led Cubans to the streets.
The long blackouts of up to 18 hours are reminiscent of those experienced in the 1990s during the so-called Special Period, after the loss of aid from the former Soviet Union.
Now, the shipment of fuel from allied countries such as Russia or Venezuela has been affected, and there are also recurring breakdowns at the Antonio Guiteras Thermoelectric Plant, the main one in the country.
From Santiago de Cuba, a neighbor who asked to remain anonymous confirms that the blackouts continue, and that at least no food has arrived at her warehouse for a month.
Even though a popular revolt broke out very close to her house a week ago, she says that the city returned to normal.
To quell the protest, the Government sent products such as rice and sugar to some very localized warehouses.
It also deployed its police and military forces to defuse the demonstration.
The blackouts, lasting more than ten hours a day in many provinces, are an ordeal for many Cubans and are one of the triggers for the protests.Yander Zamora (EFE)
Díaz Canel accuses the US of “heating up the streets of Cuba”
The first secretary of the Communist Party in Santiago de Cuba, Beatriz Johnson Urrutia, was sent to calm the popular revolt, announcing the immediate shipment of food to certain warehouses in the city.
“We cannot deny that it was a very tense situation,” she said later, when appearing in the official press.
“But as always, the people understood.”
At the time when the protests were taking place, the ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged on attend to the complaints” of the people.
The speech of the president, the Cuban Foreign Ministry or the state press has been the same: blaming the protests on the alleged interference of the United States.
Díaz-Canel blamed the “mediocre politicians and terrorists” of South Florida for “heating up the streets of Cuba,” something that Vedant Patel, chief deputy spokesperson for the State Department, immediately denied.
“The United States is not behind the protests in Cuba and that accusation is absurd,” he said in an official statement.
“Yesterday's protests in several cities in Cuba demanded electricity, food and fundamental freedoms.
“I think what we are seeing is a reflection of the serious situation on the island,” he added.
No clarity on the number of detainees
Almost three years after the protests of July 11 and 12, the first of that magnitude in the country since the Revolution was in power, the demands remain the same: the generalized situation of precariousness that the country is experiencing.
Camila Rodríguez, coordinator of the group Justicia 11J, which monitors the situation of the thousands of political prisoners left behind by the previous protests, assures that there were dozens of detainees during Sunday's demonstrations, but it has only been possible to confirm the identity of five people, two in the demonstrations in Bayamo, two in El Cobre and one in Matanzas.
So far at least three of those detained have been released, two of them after paying fines for the alleged crimes of “public disorder.”
However, Raudiel Peña, a Cubalex lawyer, thinks that "it is very possible that the Government will once again resort to the same practices it developed after July 11," such as charging sedition crimes to some of the people who have been detained until the moment.
“We do not rule out that this happens due to the way in which the Cuban State criminalizes protests,” he says.
As in the July demonstrations, the Government resorted to constant Internet blackouts and police and military deployment, and although there are several videos that show police repressing protesters, these protests would have been less violent than previous ones.
“We must also understand that these protests have not been as massive throughout the country as those on July 11, although there is evidence of beatings of protesters, police intervention, and militarization,” says Peña.
Due to the repression that the Government has historically exercised against those who protest on the island, it has been difficult for Cubans for years to go out and occupy public spaces.
Although a survey by the independent CubaData project shows that one in two Cubans intends to participate in civil protests, few end up joining the demonstrations.
In the country, discontent only grows, because the situation in the last at least five years has worsened and there is no short-term solution in sight.
Cubans had a 2023 marked by food shortages, lack of medicine and fuel, which affected transportation and caused many blackouts during the year.
The economy contracted 2%, hit by the coronavirus pandemic, the fall of the tourism sector, aggravated by the United States economic embargo on the island, inefficient government management and several errors in taking measures.
A series of decisions at the government level have taken place since then, some of which suggest that the country's leadership is not at its best: not only did they implement a package of economic measures that increased the cost of living of the Cuban family, but at the beginning of 2024 they had to stop these measures, and, without anyone suspecting it, they announced the rapid dismissal of the then Minister of Economy, Alejandro Gil Fernández, who it was later learned was under investigation for corruption crimes. .
On many occasions the Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, has recognized the lack of fuel in the country, and has said that the Government will have a solution.
In the midst of the sustained inconvenience caused in Cuba by the lack of electricity, the minister said that “the fuel situation in the future will be better,” but the Cuban economist Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva, former director of the Center for Studies of Cuban Economy from the University of Havana, told EL PAÍS that he believes that 2024 will be even a worse year than the previous one.
“January, February and March have been very terrible.
These are months in which there has not only been a lack of electricity, but also a lack of water, a lack of food.
“There really is a very complex situation in the country.”
Everleny insists that the current blackouts on the island have been joined not only by the lack of food, but also by non-compliance with delivery cycles in the country's warehouses.
“There are provinces, like the eastern ones, where products have not been delivered for a month.
It doesn't seem to me that there is a short-term solution.
There is no fuel because there is no money to pay for the ships, and the money to have it has to be generated, and I don't think there are enough imports to make up for that lack in the short term."
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