Criminalization of hunger: police violence against Cuban mothers demanding food for their children

On the night of May 31 and the early morning of June 1, in the capital's Marianao municipality, a neighborhood protest began like so many others in recent months in Cuba. After long hours without electricity, and facing the prospect of another sleepless night due to the heat, mosquitoes and lack of water, the kettles began to sound first on balconies and patios, and then in the street. Little by little, neighbors gathered at the same point in the neighborhood, united by the common experience of living without enough food, without electricity, without drinking water and without a response from the local authorities.

The protest brought together mostly women and mothers who, after more than twenty hours without power, waited in vain for the return of electricity to be able to cook something for their hungry children. These are families who have been without enough water for weeks because the turbines cannot work without electricity; households who see the little food bought at exorbitant prices spoil for lack of refrigeration; people who no longer remember having drunk cold water or slept a full night. In the midst of the public outcry, a mother was detained by police officers and placed in a patrol car while her young son witnessed her being handcuffed. The child was left crying in the street until other women took over his care and demanded the return of their neighbor. The mother was returned hours later, but fined, summoned for questioning and threatened with separation from her son if she protested publicly again.

Over the past few months, Cuba has seen a growing sequence of pots and pans, street closures and complaints on social networks associated with the collapse of public services, food insecurity and the inability of the authorities to provide reliable information or minimal answers. According to the Cuban Observatory of Conflicts, between January and May 2026, 1,421 protests and complaints were documented in the categories of Public Services and Food-Inflation. In many cases, the claims resulted in arbitrary arrests, summonses, police intimidation and militarization of public spaces.

Since mid-May, the focused protests that had been increasing since January have begun to be sustained for several days, especially in Havana, Matanzas, Holguín, Camagüey, Santiago de Cuba and Las Tunas. In WhatsApp groups monitored by Food Monitor Program, where neighbors organized by neighborhoods usually notify each other about the distribution of donations, the connection of water or the restoration of electricity, public catharsis has also opened the way to public catharsis: "What will become of us if even the State agencies lie to us, informing us what is not? In my house we have been without power for more than 30 hours," write the users of these exchanges.

Vicarious state-sponsored violence

The Zamora case also reveals a chain of erroneous state procedures. The first is the authorities' interpretation of a social emergency as a public order problem. In cases like this, the response to the community without electricity, without water and without the possibility of carrying out any household chores, is not differentiated attention or transparent information, but forced demobilization by police agents. The priority is to impose order to the detriment of informing and being accountable to citizens, this speaks of a State that no longer has what to guarantee or even communicate. In fact, the official channels of public utility companies such as Aguas de La Habana or the Unión Eléctrica de Cuba usually block on their social networks users who question their operation. In parallel, Cuban authorities are entrenched in a discourse of resistance and epic not very credible for ordinary Cubans.

When this façade does not work, the government resorts to criminalization of citizen demand as a penal norm; to sobering legal processes; and to surveillance and obedience as the main interests of its administration. In recent years it has become common, for example, for demonstrators to be arrested and prosecuted under common causes: "contempt" and "public disorder" are the most common. On occasions where the claim takes place in social networks and gains replicas due to its seriousness, Cuban authorities have imposed more serious crimes such as "mercenarism" or "dissemination of enemy propaganda."

The second blunder is the threat of family separation as a mechanism of intimidation against the demonstrators. The detention of the mother in front of her son and his abandonment on the public road show a severe failure of protection by the competent authorities, but also reveal where the priority of the National Revolutionary Police (PNR) lies. The "warning" that the mother receives—basically the threat of being separated from her son if she complains again about the inhuman conditions in which they survive—cannot be read in any other way than as an instrument of punishment by a State that uses vicarious violence on the family and affective structure of its citizens. Vicarious violence, in this sense, is institutionalized as a resource to discipline the desperation of mothers, using the maternal-filial bond, taking over the affective and social life of families.

This is a relevant suffocation mechanism if one understands the role of Cuban women in the precarization of the food environment. Food insecurity in Cuba is deeply feminized, because it is on women that the practical architecture of survival falls. Addressing the feminization of poverty means then, admitting by the official instances, that mothers, grandmothers, caregivers and heads of household are the ones who suffer more hunger and at the same time, the feminized overload of care: to manage, dissimulate, ration and respond emotionally to the lack of a plate of food before their-children.

For two years now, Food Monitor Program has been warning about the criminalization of citizens' demand for a dignified life, has also recently documented the minimal conditions under which Cuban families survive in the wake of the near paralyzation of the country. According to the Food Security Survey, conducted in mid-2025, 79% of Cubans considered the current crisis worse than that of the so-called Special Period; but it is to be expected that this criterion has gained prominence since January. In addition, 80% of the families interviewed identified the Cuban state as the most responsible for the food shortages in Cuba, while 82% stated that they feared that the Cuban government would make decisions that would make access to food even more difficult. The recognition of institutional helplessness is perhaps the most acute burden for what we are witnessing today in Cuba. A habanera expresses this idea clearly:

Don't you think we deserve a break? I am not stupid. No change comes served on a golden platter, and I regret very much that this system has never prepared us to live with access to rights. We don't know how to work outside of this made-up system here. But if that were to happen, I have faith, I am sure that life would improve, for the simple fact that it cannot get any worse and as it is there is no body that can endure it..

Protest, in this scenario of extreme exhaustion, does not arise solely from political indignation. It is the natural result of social frustration, of time paralyzed in a country where labor and educational activities are being suspended or cut back, of the accumulation of a deep psychosocial damage when one does not eat, does not sleep and lives in constant restlessness, "hunting" minimum opportunities in which drinking water and electricity coincide to reach to perform some domestic task. Thus, Cubans do not leave their homes waiting for electricity to be connected for at least an hour and to be able to charge the equipment with batteries; or water to be able to store it. In the WhatsApp groups mentioned above, many neighbors are alerted when the water, after long days of drought, is connected during the early morning. Then the whole neighborhood wakes up at 3:00 am to clean or wash; the same happens at whatever time the current is connected.

In sum, if these conditions maintain or even worsen in the months to come—of higher temperatures, school recess and therefore greater demand at home, and at the gates of a cyclonic season that has proven to be devastating on other occasions—the current protests will not be sustainable for the powers that be. Where there is no capacity for negotiation, conciliation, or even intimidation beyond detention in a cell with the same conditions of eviction as in the streets themselves, there are few ways to avoid public outcry. Cases like Zamora, and so many more that are replicated every day in Cuba, show the turning point where the food, energy, water, sanitary and political crises are no longer compatible with the human development of Cubans.