14ymedio, Havana, 11 October 2022 – One of the most talked-about protests of Monday night took place in Güines, Mayabeque, where locals from the areas of El Reparto and Leguina came out onto the street to demand the restoring of electricity — accompanied by the banging of pans and insults shouted towards the Cuban government.
At one particular point the demonstrators closed-off one street and set fire to three rubbish skips.
“It all grew quite ugly”, said one witness to 14ymedio, withholding his identity because “you already know how they’re going after everyone at the moment”. He even deleted a WhatsApp video of the protests that he’d been sent, for fear of being detained.
“You couldn’t hardly see anything, but you could hear the shouting: ’put the power back on, you prick!’ ’Diaz-Canal asshole!’ and stuff like that”, said the man, who added that the police arrived with “a truckload of special troops, but they couldn’t get out of the vehicle”. What awaited them, according to his account, was a mob with machetes in hand, who threw rocks, glass doorknobs and excrement at them.
After the retreat of these troops, he continues, another vehicle arrived, with “kids from the Servicio Militar, dressed in civilian clothing and with big sticks in their hands”, to whom the people shouted: “Come on then with your sticks! We’re going to kill you right here, just like they did in the time of the mambise guerillas! Shoot, assholes, shoot, ’cos no one here is scared anymore!” This contingent also “had to retreat”.
Another neighbour tells of how they pushed him into one of the trucks on one side and he escaped out the other side, but that the forces “took away a lot of people”.
This neighbour says that there hadn’t been any power for the whole day, and he warned that: “If they cut it off as night falls you know what’s gonna happen here. Because things are already overheated.” And he showed his outrage with the authorities: “There has to be nothing left for them now, something’s got to give, the moment has to finally arrive for them now.”
Translated by Ricardo Recluso
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