Dozens of residents, mostly mothers, protested outside the municipal government building in Guanabacoa, a municipality of Havana, on 12 August after 30 to 50 hours without electricity1. They chanted for power to be restored and complained about the water supply and about food spoiling in dead refrigerators. Unión Eléctrica, the state grid operator, had forecast a 2,197 MW deficit for that day.
An outage of that length stops being an electricity problem. Water reaches most Havana flats through electric pumps, and a refrigerator that thaws takes a household's rationed protein with it, so two days without power removes food that a family cannot easily replace and water it cannot store.
The crowd went to the municipal government rather than to the utility, as Cuban blackout protests have tended to since cacerolazos broke out in Santa Clara and Havana in June. Neither office can produce electricity that has no fuel behind it. The municipality is simply the part of the state with a door on the street, which is what makes a services failure into a political one.
