On Friday night, several hundred people in the city of Morón, on Cuba's northern coast about 250 miles east of Havana, gathered in the dark to protest prolonged power outages and food shortages. They marched through unlit streets banging pots and pans and shining cellphone flashlights. The protest began peacefully. By early Saturday morning, it had not stayed that way.
A smaller group broke off and approached the municipal headquarters of the Communist Party, Cuba's only legal political organization. They threw stones through the windows, entered the building, dragged furniture into the street, and set it on fire. Footage verified by multiple outlets shows protesters carrying burning objects toward the building while others chanted "Libertad, libertad!" In one video, the sound of gunfire is audible, and a man appears to collapse while bystanders scream in Spanish: "They shot him! They're shooting! They said they wouldn't shoot, but they shot him." Other protesters are then seen carrying the injured man away.
Cuban state media denied that anyone was struck by police gunfire. The government's statement said the man who collapsed was intoxicated and fell, and that he was treated at a hospital. The interior ministry announced five arrests and described the incident as "vandalism acts." Vandals also targeted a pharmacy and a government market nearby.
What makes this significant is that protests in Cuba, particularly violent ones, are exceedingly rare. The country's 2019 constitution technically grants citizens the right to demonstrate, but the law defining that right more specifically has been stalled in the legislature for years, which leaves anyone who takes to the streets in a kind of legal limbo where they can be arrested without a clear standard for what is or is not permitted. Andrés Pertierra, a historian of Cuba at the University of Wisconsin, told the New York Times that attempts to burn a Communist Party building are "extremely unusual," and that past protests have typically been limited to demands for electricity or basic services rather than direct attacks on party institutions.
The immediate trigger was a blackout. But the underlying cause runs much deeper than a single power outage. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said last week that no petroleum shipments had arrived in Cuba for three months. He blamed a U.S. energy blockade, and the timeline supports that claim. In January, Trump ordered an end to transfers of Venezuelan oil to Cuba following the U.S. operation that removed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Then on January 29th, Trump signed an executive order threatening economic penalties against any country that supplied Cuba with oil, whether directly or indirectly. Cuba's aging power grid runs almost entirely on fossil fuels, so cutting off petroleum imports is functionally the same as cutting off electricity. Two power plants have shut down. Solar parks are operating at reduced capacity. The most recent island-wide blackout was caused by a broken boiler at a thermoelectric plant that forced the shutdown of the entire power grid.
But the protests in Morón are not isolated. Since March 6th, groups of residents across multiple provinces have been taking to the streets nightly. In Havana, residents have been banging pots to protest blackouts. In Santiago de Cuba, opposition leader José Daniel Ferrer reported a substantial deployment of Ministry of the Interior forces surrounding the provincial court and Communist Party headquarters. Military personnel and civilians have been stationed outside party buildings in Sancti Spíritus. Journalist José Raúl Gallego reported that both military and civilian personnel had been mobilized to act in the event of confrontations with citizens. Independent journalist Yosmany Mayeta said that in Santiago de Cuba, orders had been given to suppress and detain people attempting to protest.
Trump told reporters that the Cuban government is "in a big deal of trouble" and suggested there might be a "friendly takeover of Cuba." During remarks earlier this month, he said Cuba would be "next" after the Iran war concludes. Whatever one thinks about the Cuban government, and there is plenty to criticize, it is worth noting that the conditions driving these protests are not spontaneous. The energy crisis is a direct and foreseeable consequence of U.S. policy decisions made in January and February of this year. People in Morón were not marching because they woke up one morning and decided to attack a party building. They were marching because their homes had been dark for over a day, because there has been no fuel for months, and because the stores where they buy food are running empty. The fire in the street was furniture from the reception area of a Communist Party office. The fire underneath all of it is the question of how long 11 million people can live like this before something breaks open that cannot be put back together.