Demonstrations erupted across Havana on Wednesday evening as residents faced the city’s most severe rolling blackouts in decades, worsened by a U.S. blockade that has left the island struggling with fuel shortages.
Crowds of hundreds of angry Cubans poured onto the streets in several outlying neighborhoods, blocking roads with burning piles of rubbish, banging pots and shouting “Turn on the lights!” and “The people, united, will never be defeated!”
Multiple groups of peaceful protesters were witnessed in locations across the city, marking the largest single night of demonstrations in Havana since the energy crisis took hold.
The shortages and blackouts have dramatically worsened since January when U.S. President Donald Trump, who has said he wants to oust Cuba’s communist-run government, imposed an embargo and threatened tariffs on any nation supplying the country with fuel.
There was a heavy police presence at each site, though security forces remained largely on the sidelines, observing and not intervening.
Cuba’s energy and mines minister earlier in the day said the nation had completely run out of diesel and fuel oil, and that its power grid had entered a “critical” state.
“We have absolutely no fuel (oil), and absolutely no diesel,” Energy Minister Vicente de la O said on state-run media. “We have no reserves.”
Blackouts have increased dramatically this week, with many districts of Havana without light for 20 to 22 hours a day, the minister said, heightening tensions in a city already exhausted by food, fuel and medicine shortages.
Pleas For Fuel
The country’s top energy official said Cuba continued negotiations to import fuel despite the blockade but said rising global oil and transportation prices as a result of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran were further complicating that effort.
“Cuba is open to anyone that wants to sell us fuel,” the minister said.
Neither Mexico nor Venezuela, once top suppliers of oil to Cuba, have sent fuel to the island since Trump’s order threatening tariffs.
Only a single large oil tanker, the Russian-flagged Anatoly Kolodkin, has delivered crude oil to Cuba since December, providing temporary relief to the island in April.
The renewed power cuts in Havana and beyond come as the U.S. blockade on fuel imports to Cuba enters its fourth month, crippling public services across the Caribbean island of nearly 10 million people.
The United Nations last week called Trump’s fuel blockade unlawful, saying it had obstructed the “Cuban people’s right to development while undermining their rights to food, education, health, and water and sanitation.”
(With inputs from Reuters)
