A video posted on social media this Saturday showed a dumpster burning at the corner of Sitios and División streets in the Los Sitios neighborhood of Centro Habana, with intense flames and a dense column of black smoke rising above a road marked by deterioration and the accumulation of trash.
The recording, shared by the user Danny González La Rosa on his Facebook profile, was accompanied by a phrase that reflects the increasing normalization of the crisis among the people of Havana: "The Capital of Trash... This has already become Normal."
The images show a massive pile of burning trash made up of wood, plastics, and household waste, alongside visibly deteriorated buildings and cracked pavement.
The situation once again highlights the health and urban crisis facing Centro Habana, where trash remains uncollected for weeks and fires in makeshift dumps have become a common feature of the daily landscape.
In 2026 so far, the number of garbage dump fires in the densely populated municipality has multiplied: one in Águila and Monte on April 1, another in Maloja and Lealtad during a blackout on April 6, and two incidents that endangered the Parish of San Judas Tadeo and San Nicolás de Bari, also in the Los Sitios neighborhood, on April 9 and April 23.
A few days ago, the comedian Rigoberto Ferrera documented another garbage burning in La Pera park, in the Plaza de la Revolución municipality, at six in the evening.
Despair has driven some residents to deliberately set fire to the garbage bins in order to force the arrival of the firefighters and take advantage of the water from their trucks.
The Food Monitor Program documented this practice in the Reina neighborhood and described it as "a precarious solution born out of necessity and the lack of institutional response."
The root of the problem is structural. Havana generates between 24,000 and 30,000 cubic meters of solid waste daily, but only 44 of its 106 garbage trucks are operational due to a lack of diesel, which leaves up to 23,814 cubic meters uncollected each day.
The regime itself has acknowledged its incapacity. In September 2025, the Minister of Science, Technology, and the Environment, Armando Rodríguez Batista, admitted that "this waste is not contained, it is spread all over Havana."
In December, the government acknowledged that it cannot clean the capital or pay the street sweepers a decent wage and that out of 126 planned trash bins, only 31 were manufactured, while of the promised 1,000 carts, only 40 were completed.
In February, authorities announced a plan of 49 measures that promised to import 15,000 containers and deploy 450 brigades, including military units. However, the trash heaps continue to burn in the same corners.
Filed under: