In Santos Suarez, residents took over a street and set fire to the many open-air rubbish piles and an Etecsa installation
14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 11 June 2026 / The banging of pots and pans in broad daylight is becoming a regular occurrence. It happened again this Wednesday in the Havana neighbourhood of Luyano, in full view of two police patrols that this time limited themselves to watching as residents beat their cookware to the chant of “water and power”.
Those who leaned out onto their balconies to see what was happening were invited to join in. “It’s not up there, it’s down here, in the street,” one resident shouted at the onlookers still holding back from the protest. Others beat their pans more discreetly from their balconies. By that point they had been without power for some 27 hours – which also meant no water.
The protest, which 14ymedio was able to witness, was not the only one to take place this Wednesday in the capital – or elsewhere in Cuba. The months the population has spent enduring blackouts of sometimes more than 48 hours straight are taking an even greater toll with the summer heat.
Watch video here “Water and Power”, the desperate shout of the women of Luyanó, exhausted by the constant outages.
In Santos Suarez, the night was less peaceful. The protest began after 8 pm and the intensity kept building until, according to an eyewitness account on social media, the crowd took over Calle General Serrano from one end to the other, setting fire to every one of the many rubbish piles until the situation spiralled out of control.
“They didn’t restore the electricity. They almost burned down the Las Estrellitas de Serrano children’s centre. The fire brigade had to come to stop it spreading further. Further along Calle General Serrano they couldn’t control the fire and it burned the Etecsa server – those cabinets on certain street corners – leaving more than half the neighbourhood without communications,” an eyewitness recounted. To cap it all, the state monopoly has said it has no spare parts to repair it and the blackout will not be short-lived.
“At one of the corners where they lit the rubbish piles, because it was night-time, the wind carried the smoke into the homes and a young girl ended up at the Raul Gomez polyclinic because she is asthmatic – and that’s without counting all the other residents breathing in those chemicals,” the resident lamented. In her post she reproaches the United States for the energy blockade and the regime for demanding resistance “with no intention of proposing any positive change. And caught between these two governments, the Cuban people are strangling themselves with that rope”.
The night was a long one again. The forecast deficit was 2,040 megawatts: at peak hours the electricity system generates only 990 MW while demand stands at at least 3,000. The Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant – the country’s main one – had been expected to come back online this Wednesday after three intensive days of repairs.
In the end, the situation has dragged on a little longer and, on Wednesday afternoon, workers were awaiting the start of the hydraulic test, which will determine when the restart can begin, following verification of all the weld seams and areas of concern in the boiler.
Engineer Roman Perez Castaneda, the plant’s director general, told the official press that the inspection would take around six hours – a “decisive moment to assess the work and correct any weak points”. If the results are favourable, the boiler is closed and fired up, after which a further six hours are needed to reach operating parameters, produce usable steam and begin turning the turbine – the steps required before reconnecting to the national electricity grid.
“We acknowledge it is a race against time, but we have confidence in the work that has been carried out,” said Perez Castaneda. The worst news is that at this stage the 200 MW the Guiteras plant can contribute barely matters when the shortfall is ten times that.
Translated by GH
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