For the second consecutive day, this Friday night and during part of the morning of this Saturday, the residents of Nuevitas, Camagüey, took to the streets again to protest the long blackouts. The demonstration began in the Pastelillo neighborhood and was repressed by the police, who arrested and beat several participants, according to videos broadcast live from the scene.
With a pot-banging and shouting “turn on the power, dick”, “freedom”, “hey, police dick” and “we don’t want more misery”, dozens of people demanded that the electricity service be restored. In the images you can see numerous police and military vehicles that come close to the demonstrators and the police attack some of them, including at least two girls who reported having been beaten by the uniformed men.
The protesters also shout “the people united will never be defeated” and denounce that several repressors were dressed in civilian clothes to blend in with the crowd. “Those are children, they are children,” one of the protesting women is heard shouting as the police attack a group of those marching down the street.
“All day long they filled the town with black berets who slowly passed through each street with their vehicles to intimidate us,” denounces a young protester who prefers anonymity. “They thought that by getting scared we were not going to throw ourselves into the street, but we had already told them that if they cut off the light again, we would throw ourselves again.”
“They also cut off the internet for several hours, that’s why there are many people who still haven’t been able to post the videos of the repression. The plainclothes policemen started throwing stones at people and that made people even more heated,” Explain. “Number 1 neighborhood also took to the streets,” she adds.
According to another Internet user, the police placed a powerful spotlight on the entrance bridge to Pastelillo to “blind the protesters” and try to control the situation. “But people threw stones at him, the ground was full of stones,” he explained.
In a video posted on YouTube, several neighbors are seen having a heated argument with a police officer and another man who identifies himself as a “secretary” apparently from the Communist Party. The neighbors denounce that “in Havana they don’t turn off the power like here” and the official responds that with the protests “what Nuevitas is doing is embarrassing.”
“It is true that the police came to attack the people here,” denounces one of the neighbors. “Why did they come playing handsome today?” Questions a woman who details the attack on an 11-year-old girl. “You may have a plant [eléctrica] at home but we don’t have. We are stubborn”, adds a man who has “two children who cannot sleep”.
This protest occurs a few hours after hundreds of people took to the streets in the same Camagüey city early Friday morning in a demonstration not seen in Cuba since July 11, 2021.
#Urgent | #Share This Friday’s demonstration in #News for the #blackouts, was repressed by the police who arrested and beat several participants, according to videos broadcast live or recorded from the scene. More information in https://t.co/i96XEeJmqq pic.twitter.com/7AlYlZ52Pk
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The protest, as was also seen in numerous videos shared on social networks, was massive, lit by cell phone flashlights and motorcycle headlights and accompanied by saucepans, horns, claps and loud slogans.
According to residents of Nuevitas 14ymediothe demonstrators headed towards the headquarters of the local Communist Party, a building that was illuminated in the midst of the darkness of the power outage, and there they shouted: “if they take it down again, we’ll throw it out again”, “we want freedom” and the traditional “The people united will never be defeated”.
Although the police arrived at the scene, “they could practically do nothing, because this was a sea of people.” Right away, he says, they turned on the power. “They got scared of us,” the source said.
To respond to the popular protest, the ruling party organized a march on Friday with Cuban flags, photos of Fidel Castro and the old slogan “Pin pon out, down with the worms”, a slogan that gained strength in 1980 during the migratory crisis of Mariel and that was used against Cubans who decided to leave the country.
In the official counter march, an official assured that Nuevitas had “heart and drums” to defend the Revolution.
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