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The door of the Parish of Saint Jude Thaddeus and Saint Nicholas of Bari, in Centro Habana, was charred and destroyed early this morning after unknown individuals set fire to the garbage piled up on San Nicolás Street, and the flames reached the temple.
The community of the Escolapios Fathers reported the incident on Facebook and pointed directly to the waste management crisis as the underlying cause: "We know that these burnings are not random: in many neighborhoods across the country, including Centro Habana, people are setting fire to waste as a form of protest against the constant power outages affecting all of Cuba and the lack of garbage collection."
No injuries or damage inside the temple were reported, but photos published by the parish show the main door completely destroyed, with charred panels, entire sections missing, and piles of ashes accumulated at the threshold.
For the Escolapios, the fire this morning is not the first they have experienced in less than a month: on March 15, a fire affected the old adjoining cloister to their church in Guanabacoa, a property expropriated by the regime in 1961 and abandoned by the Ministry of Education more than a year ago.
"The causes are still unknown to this day. No one has provided us with explanations," the priests reported regarding that incident.
The religious community claims to have exhausted all available institutional avenues: "We have held countless meetings with state institutions. Solutions were agreed upon. Plans were made. But nothing has changed. Everything has remained in planning and meetings without any reflection in reality."
The Escolapios acknowledge that the neighbors' desperation is understandable, but they warn that it does not justify the damage to their property: "That desperation is real and understandable, but it does not justify the damage to our house of faith, a place of meeting and peace."
At the same time, they point to the true culprit: "The root cause is the sustained inaction of the State in response to problems we have been denouncing for years: the uncollected garbage and the lack of clear responses."
The parish demands an investigation into the fire at the cloister in Guanabacoa, real solutions to the garbage problem in Centro Habana, the cessation of burns that harm its heritage, and that institutions uphold the agreements reached in previous meetings.
"Enough with empty promises. Enough with the silence. The fire has harmed us twice in less than a month. We will not allow a third," concluded the Piarist Fathers.
The root of the problem is structural: only 44 out of the 106 garbage collection trucks in Havana are operational due to fuel shortages, a direct consequence of decades of poor management by the regime and reliance on oil shipments from Venezuela and Mexico, which have stopped.
Due to the accumulation of waste over days or weeks without collection, and the power outages that in March lasted up to 29 consecutive hours, residents from multiple municipalities in Havana have resorted to burning garbage in the streets.
This practice has led to a series of incidents in Centro Habana: on April 6, a landfill burned on Maloja Street at the corner of Lealtad, and on April 7 another rubbish fire at the intersection of Águila and Monte spread to an abandoned store and required the intervention of firefighters.
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