Cubans stage protests demanding electricity, food

HAVANA: Cubans staged rare street protests Sunday 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, told AFP by phone from the island’s second-largest city of Santiago de Cuba, 800 kilometers (500 miles) 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.Social media platforms were filled with images of protests in Santiago de Cuba, a city of 510,000 people located 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 March due to maintenance works on the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant, the island’s largest.But 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.



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