Cubans on Sunday staged rare street protests over food and electricity shortages, as the country suffered long outages that left parts of the island without power for up to 14 hours a day.
“People were shouting ‘food and electricity,’” a 65-year-old resident, who asked not to be named, said by phone from the nation’s second-largest city, Santiago de Cuba, 800km east of the capital, Havana.
Electricity was restored to the city later in the day and “two truckloads of rice” were delivered, the witness said.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Social media platforms were filled with images of protests in Santiago de Cuba, a city of 510,000 people in the east of the island. There were also images of protests in another large city, Bayamo.
Cuba has been experiencing a wave of blackouts since the start of this month due to maintenance works on the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant, the nation’s largest.
However, this weekend, the situation was worsened by a shortage of fuel needed to generate the electricity.
The outages left some areas such as Santiago de Cuba without power for up to 14 hours a day.
“Several people have expressed their dissatisfaction with the electricity situation and food distribution,” Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said on X, warning that “enemies of the Revolution” aimed to exploit the situation.
There are “terrorists based in the United States, whom we have denounced on several occasions, who are encouraging actions that go against the internal order of the country,” he added.
The US embassy in Havana said on X that it was aware of reports of “peaceful protests” in Santiago, Bayamo and other parts of Cuba.
It urged the Cuban government to “respect the human rights of the protestors and address the legitimate needs of the Cuban people.”
Cuban Minister of Foreign Affairs Bruno Rodriguez responded on X, urging Washington not to “interfere in the country’s internal affairs.”
Cuba’s power comes from eight old thermoelectric power plants, generators and eight floating electricity plants leased from Turkey, which were also affected by the fuel shortage.
The cash-strapped island nation earlier this month imposed a more than 400 percent fuel price hike month as part of an economic recovery plan.
The nation of 11 million is experiencing its worst economic crisis since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the 1990s due to fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, the recent tightening of US sanctions and structural weaknesses in the economy.
Official estimates showed that the Cuban economy shrank by 2 percent last year, while inflation reached 30 percent. Independent experts say this is likely an underestimation.
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