Cacerolazos, street protests where residents bang pots and pans, broke out in Santa Clara and Havana on the night of 17 June, the eve of the Communist Party plenum1. The slogan has shifted from "electricity and food" to "down with the dictatorship," first heard in El Cotorro on 10 June2. The Cuban Conflict Observatory, an independent monitor that tracks social conflict on the island, logged 1,311 protests in May, near the December 2025 record of 1,3333.
Protesters in Santa Clara were banging pots over the incoming reform, not waiting for it. The package was sold partly as political stabilisation, and the movement had already moved past the grievances economic liberalisation could address. Power cuts ran up to 20 hours a day in Villa Clara province in the days before the protests, against blackouts of 12 to 22 hours in the capital4.
The sequence inverts the usual order. The first confirmed capital cacerolazos came barely two weeks earlier; the cadence is now weekly, and the demand is no longer about the grid. Cuba's 2021 and 2022 protest waves escalated from economic to political demands within days once the security response radicalised participants. The May total approaching the December record suggests the 2026 cycle has reached a similar inflection without a single trigger event. The protest cycle now leads the policy cycle: pots preceded the plenum rather than reacting to it, which leaves the reform's stabilisation logic answering a demand the street has already abandoned.
