Gibara, Cuba Protest Over Blackouts Met with Repression

By Raul Medina Orama (El Toque)

HAVANA TIMES – On September 13, 2025, dozens of people protested in Gibara, a city in the eastern Cuban province of Holguín, against power outages. According to local sources, another blackout that lasted more than 20 hours pushed residents to take to the streets to demand that authorities restore the service, just days after the fifth total collapse of Cuba’s National Electric System (SEN) in less than a year.

According to the testimony of one participant, they took to the streets “in protest over the blackouts,” he said in a live broadcast on Facebook. “A lot of people are coming from Pueblo Nuevo. It’s a demonstration heading toward the [Communist] Party (…), it’s a sea of people,” he added.

Videos shared on social media showed groups of Gibara residents marching in the darkness of the blackout, banging pots and pans and shouting: “The people, united, will never be defeated!” In another moment of the protest, captured in a short video given exclusively to El Toque, they demanded: “Freedom, freedom.”

One protester who spoke to El Toque on condition of anonymity said that the “peaceful march” ended after confronting the authorities and when electricity and water services were restored. However, the following day, agents from the Ministry of the Interior (Minint) began arresting several residents accused of participating in the protest in the coastal city, located on the country’s northern shore.

The source said that at least seven people — including a relative — were arrested and taken to the Pedernales detention center in Holguín. There they were reportedly being processed, depending on the case, for the alleged crimes of contempt, assault, or public disorder, legal categories commonly used by the authorities to punish dissent in Cuba.

Martí Noticias reported that among those arrested were Suleidi Aballe Claro, Reymundo Galván Claro, and Pedro Jose Sanz Garcia, known as “Porron.” Journalist Mario J. Pentón stated that on Sunday, September 14, sources in Gibara told him that the protest had resulted in “more than a dozen detainees.”

A Cuban resident of Gibara posted a video of a police patrol in the Petrocasas neighborhood during an arrest. Photos of other residents arrested after Saturday’s events have also begun circulating on social media.

The police persecution contrasts with the official version. The state television channel Gibaravisión published on social media: “a group of residents of Güirito (…) left their homes to express their discontent from a position of respect and dialogue,” before whom “the authorities came to answer their questions and exchange views. Everything took place on the basis of empathy and respect,” the state outlet assured.

In statements to El Toque following the protests in Gibara, Yaxys Cires, director of strategies at the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH), argued that “the socioeconomic situation in Cuba is critical and that the regime is taking a dangerous stance between immobility and repression.”

Disapproval of the authorities imposed by the Cuban Communist Party stands at 92%, according to the VIII Study on the State of Social Rights in Cuba by the OCDH. For the first time since the NGO began conducting this annual survey, blackouts rank as Cubans’ number one concern (72%), slightly surpassing the food crisis (71%). They also expressed discontent over the high cost of living (61%), low wages (45%), and poor public health care (42%).

According to Cires, within officialdom “there isn’t even a credible attempt to find solutions to the problems that plague people. It’s as if they deliberately wanted people to suffer.”

Although since the harsh repression against the July 2021 social uprising — which left hundreds of political prisoners — demonstrations have been fewer in number and more geographically limited, they have not stopped happening.

During 2025, the organization Justicia 11J has documented at least 202 protest events in Cuba of varying magnitude, ranging from street demonstrations to anti-government graffiti, pot-banging protests, and other forms of public expressions of discontent and defiance of power.

In its report Another Year Without Justice (2025), Justicia 11J described the authorities’ response as “a state policy of systematic punishment that combines physical violence, judicial criminalization, and public smear campaigns” against those who take part in demonstrations.

After Saturday’s protest in Gibara was quelled, the Communist Party secretary in that municipality, Nayla Marieta Leyva Rodríguez, wrote on her Facebook account: “Let’s trust in the tremendous Revolution we have, which never abandons its children and stands strong in the search for solutions.”

First published in Spanish by El Toque and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.

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