Miami Herald | Monday, March 18, 2024 
We are hungry’: Cubans take to the streets in the second-largest city to protest

Hundreds of people in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba’s second-largest city, protested on the streets on Sunday, chanting “electricity and food” and “Patria y Vida,” homeland and life, in what appeared the largest demonstration on the island since the July 2021 uprising. A video live stream on Facebook by an anonymous user at 3:38 p.m. on Sunday showed a large crowd protesting along Santiago’s Carretera del Morro Avenue. Activist Yasmany Labrada, a former Santiago dissident who currently lives in Washington, D.C., published other videos of the protest, where Santiago residents can be heard chanting “we are hungry” and the presence of military forces at the scene. As Cubans reported a cut in internet service, videos started to appear on Sunday evening, also showing protests in Bayamo, one of Cuba’s oldest cities in the eastern province of Granma, in Cacocún, in the eastern province of Holguín, and in Santa Marta, a town in Matanzas close to the sea resort of Varadero. News agency EFE reported that the protests started in Santiago de Cuba in front of a government building, with mothers complaining they could not feed their children, following hours without electricity. Later, hundreds of people joined, forcing the top Communist Party official in the province, Beatriz Johnson, to climb on a house roof to shout to protesters that the government would provide donated milk enough for five days along with products. Videos show how women in the crowd, many carrying their children, dismissed the official with chants of “Freedom” and “No more bullsh.…” – Read more