Observatorio Cubano de Conflictos

The Observatorio Cubano de Conflictos (OCC) is a Cuban civil-society monitoring organisation that tracks protests, public denunciations, and civic challenges to state authority inside Cuba. It is distinct from the Observatorio Cubano de Derechos Humanos (OCDH), the Madrid-based human rights monitor that publishes monthly repressive-action tallies; the OCC focuses specifically on protest and social conflict volumes. Its methodology counts social-media posts, on-island witness reports, and documented incidents to produce monthly conflict-volume statistics.

The OCC logged 1,133 protests and denunciations in April 2026, of which 305 were characterised as direct challenges to state authority. In May 2026 the count reached 1,311, near the December 2025 record of 1,333 and consistent with an intensification that the National Assembly's 18 June 2026 economic reform package did not arrest: cacerolazos broke out in Santa Clara and Havana on the eve of the Communist Party plenum that pre-approved the reforms, with slogans shifting from 'electricity and food' to 'down with the dictatorship'. The OCC's data underlines that the reform's stabilisation logic arrived after the protest movement had already moved past the grievances economic liberalisation could address.

The OCC's work feeds into the broader Cuba human rights monitoring ecosystem alongside OCDH, Prisoners Defenders, and Cubalex. Its protest counts have been cited by wire services and congressional Cuba policy discussions without methodological challenge; Havana rejects the figures as part of a foreign-funded destabilisation apparatus. Because the OCC operates in explicit opposition to the Cuban state, its data is treated by international observers as requiring corroboration from independent sources, which the April and May 2026 figures received from parallel reporting on blackout protests and the shift in protest slogans.