Cuba blackout protests spread as internet and mobile data fail

Internet and mobile data collapsed in Centro Habana, Regla and other Havana neighborhoods just as new protests over prolonged blackouts spilled into the streets. Residents said the outages began as the gatherings were being announced, leaving people unable to send messages, use mobile data, or upload video from the areas where the unrest was growing.

In Central Havana, people blocked Escobar Street with burning trash barricades in daylight, a rare move in a country where protests often happen at night to make identification harder. Similar actions were reported in Regla, San Miguel del Padrón and La Güinera, with burning tires, road closures and chants moving across the capital as the blackout anger spread from block to block.

The communications failure added a second layer to the unrest. ETECSA, the state telecom monopoly, did not publicly explain the outages, even as the combination of blackouts and weak backup batteries was reported to be knocking out a significant share of mobile base stations and telecom cabinets nationwide. An ETECSA official has already acknowledged that telecom infrastructure in Cuba cannot remain operational for more than 24 hours without electricity, a reality that turns every long outage into a wider communications collapse.

That fragility has become central to Cuba’s protest cycle. Human Rights Watch says the country is facing protests over prolonged blackouts, shortages, deteriorating living conditions and sharply higher internet costs. The group says ETECSA’s price hikes in May 2026 made internet access harder for most Cubans and triggered 46 protests in June, the highest number linked to a single event in 2025 at the time of writing. HRW also says Cuba has lost around 10% of its population in recent years according to government figures, while hundreds of government critics remain behind bars.

The unrest has been building for months. The Cuban Observatory of Conflicts documented 1,133 protests in April 2026, a 29.5% increase over April 2025, and Cubalex said at least 14 people had been arrested in Havana in connection with cacerolazo protests since March 6. La Güinera carries special weight in that pattern because it was one of the epicenters of the July 11, 2021 demonstrations. With electricity, phones and mobile data failing together, the latest wave of protests left Cubans even less able to organize, document what was happening, or reach relatives outside the blackout zone.