Havana Nights Fill with Pot-Banging Protests over Blackouts
The energy crisis that afflicts the Island comes to the surrounding areas of the Casino Deportivo, where villas with gardens are plentiful.
HAVANA TIMES – The areas surrounding the Casino Deportivo residential neighborhood, in the municipality of Cerro, were pitch black on Monday night. Dark, but not at all silent. In streets like Primelles and Santa Catalina the cacerolazos (people banging on pots) were forceful. “The schedule isn’t working; people can’t sleep,” a neighbor reports to this newspaper, saying that in recent days they have had 12 hours of blackout daily.
Yesterday, the Havana Electric Company reported that a break in two circuits lefts some substations in operable: Melones and Tallapiedra, in addition to the only Turkish floating power plant) that remains in Regla, Havana. Old Havana, Centro Habana and part of San Miguel del Padron and Diez de Octubre were left without electricity. On Tuesday morning, the State-owned company announced that six sections in the capital were “affected” and “the blackout schedule could not be met.”
Although what Havana experiences is far from the power cuts of the provinces, where blackouts have lasted 26 hours in recent weeks, its residents are becoming fed up. “Now virtually anyone is banging on a pot, something that was unthinkable a year ago,” says a resident of the Casino Deportivo neighborhood.
The neighborhood, with an image of a well-to-do area in Havana where families with better economic status live, used to appear in the classified ads for homes as an area where “the lights stay on.” However, the energy crisis that afflicts the Island has also knocked on the door of the villas with gardens and spacious salons that abound in its perimeter.
Arbitrary prison sentences for some of those who have gone out in the streets to protest the energy crisis by beating on pots are an effective deterrent, but the mood is getting angrier. This Monday, despair, mainly due to the lack of water but also of light, led a group of mothers to close Monte street with their children in their arms, hoisting empty buckets.
Police officers tried to break up the protest by shoving and cursing, although moments later a water truck appeared on the scene, guarded by a patrol car, to appease the crowd.
Translated by Regina Anavy for Translating Cuba