Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said Sunday that his administration will not allow public protests during the statewide power outage, which the authorities are attempting to resolve.
The island’s ten million people were spending their third night without power after Cuba’s largest power plant collapsed on Friday, crippling the entire national grid.
Chronicle NG reports that Cuba is experiencing a statewide blackout after its national grid, the primary energy facility, failed, cutting power to its ten million residents.
The energy ministry stated on social media that its power grid had collapsed around 11:00 (15:00 GMT) on Friday. Grid officials said they were unsure how long it would take to restore power.
The island has been experiencing months of long blackouts, prompting the prime minister to declare an “energy emergency” on Thursday.
The government expects power to be restored to the majority of the country by Monday evening.
However, the president warned that there would be no tolerance for unrest in a country already dealing with record high inflation and food, medical, gasoline, and water shortages.
Diaz-Canel, dressed in a military uniform, told a news conference that some Cubans took to the streets on Saturday evening in an attempt to “disturb public order.”
The perpetrators will be tried “with the severity that revolutionary laws provide,” he stated, adding that the protestors were operating “under the direction of the foreign operators of the Cuban counter-revolution.”
Witnesses stated that residents from numerous Havana neighbourhoods took to the streets on Sunday night to vent their dissatisfaction.
People are “making noise with pots and pans, shouting, ‘Let us have the power back on,'” a Santo Suarez resident told AFP.
In July 2021, outages triggered an unprecedented outpouring of public outrage.
Thousands of Cubans marched through the streets yelling “We are hungry” and “Freedom!” in a rare challenge to the leadership.
The protests resulted in one death and dozens of injuries. According to the Mexico-based human rights organisation Justicia 11J, 600 people jailed during the unrest are still in prison.
