Other demonstrations took place in Old Havana and Cienfuegos.
14ymedio, Madrid, August 24, 2026 – A new pot-banging protest shook Havana Sunday night. This time, it was in Jaimanitas, in the municipality of Playa. In images posted on his social media by rapper Eliexer Márquez (El Funky), a crowd can be seen in the middle of the street, shouting at one another as the banging of pots rings out.
In the midst of them, a police officer tries to calm the situation. Judging by what can be seen, regime supporters confronted the protesters. Although Jaimanitas has a social makeup of fishermen, workers, artists, and people involved in tourism, it borders neighborhoods reserved for Cuba’s political elite.
At one point, a car suddenly speeds into the middle of the crowd, which had to move aside to avoid being run over. “Jaimanitas in the streets, no electricity, no water, nothing!” El Funky, co-author of Patria y Vida and an exile in Miami, posted.
Over the weekend, there were again mobilizations, both in Havana and elsewhere on the Island. According to information from CubaNet, residents of a building in Old Havana blocked Villegas between Teniente Rey and Muralla on Saturday because of continuous blackouts and the authorities’ lack of attention.
“Jaimanitas in the streets, no electricity, no water, nothing!” El Funky, co-author of Patria y Vida and an exile in Miami, posted
“People are protesting because one phase always goes down, the power goes out, and they don’t come to fix it,” a source told the independent newspaper. “The breakers caught fire and nobody does anything, so the people in that building got fed up and closed the block.”
That same Saturday, in Cienfuegos, Martí Noticias reported, about twenty residents gathered outside the Provincial Government headquarters after being without electricity since Thursday morning. The complaint, according to activist Raúl González González, coordinator of the Consenso Ciudadano movement, is that there are no service interruptions in the neighborhoods where the officials live. “They have protected circuits for entire weeks,” he told Martí Noticias.
Independent journalist Yoanni Limonta, who also lives in Cienfuegos, told the Cuban-American newspaper details of the demonstration: “Several mothers with sick children, children in their arms, went to the government, showed up there, and demanded answers regarding the excessive power cuts.”
For that day, the Electric Union had forecast a deficit of 2,240 megawatts (MW) during peak hours, against demand of 3,300 MW. That is, nearly 68% of the energy needed. The outages were compounded by the fact that the Lidio Ramón Pérez thermoelectric plant, known as Felton, was unable to resolve the breakdown that has left both of its units shut down.
“A crack in the upper area of the boiler, very close to the dome, increased water consumption in the preceding days and forced a reduction in power generation before the decision was made to shut down the unit,” Cubadebate explained in a report in which it warned that repairs to a leak in the boiler could not be completed Friday, as planned, because “they proved to be the most complex tasks on the critical path.”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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