HAVANA: Cubans staged rare street protests on Sunday over electricity and food shortages as the country suffered long outages that left some areas without power for up to fourteen hours a day.
People were shouting ‘food and electricity’,” a 65-year-old resident, who requested not to be named, told AFP by phone from the island’s second-largest city Santiago de Cuba, eight hundred kilometres (five hundred miles) east of the capital Havana.
Electricity was restored to the city later in the day and 2 truckloads of rice were delivered, the resident said.
Social media platforms were filled with photos of protests in Santiago de Cuba, a city of 510,000 people. There were also images of demonstrations in another large city, Bayamo.
Mass Protests in Cuba in 2021
Unprecedented mass anti-government demonstrations by citizens clamouring for food and greater freedoms amid deep economic and social problems in communist Cuba in July 2021 were forcefully put down.
About 500 protesters were sentenced to prison terms of up to twenty-five years, according to the authorities, on charges including sedition.
