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Several dozens of people, including children, interrupted traffic this Tuesday on the highway that surrounds Havana in protest against the blackouts.
As confirmed by several sources and reflected in videos posted on social networks, the demonstrators, mostly women with children, cut off traffic forming a chain.
The action, which took place early in the afternoon and did not last long, caused traffic jams on the road.
One of the first images of what happened was uploaded to Facebook by activist Rosa María Payá, who urged the authorities not to repress the demonstrators because there were many minors among them.
Protests against the cuts have been increasing in recent days in Cuba, which is suffering an energy crisis with frequent blackouts that affect (sometimes for more than 10 hours a day) the whole country.
This Monday a new stage of this crisis began with the inclusion among the areas with programmed outages of Havana, which until now had been largely spared from blackouts.
In the last few days, there have been about a dozen protests, among which the one in Santiago de Cuba stood out on Monday, where at least a hundred people gathered to protest the blackouts.
So far, the official press has only confirmed two of these demonstrations: one at the University of Camagüey and another in the western town of Los Palacios.
However, scenes of small protests in smaller urban centers, with pots and pans banging and shouting against the dictatorship, have been repeated lately on social networks.
Blackouts were, along with other serious economic problems, some of the factors that fueled last year’s protests in Cuba, when the largest demonstrations in decades took place.
