The Matanzas journalist Yirmara Torres Hernández posted a video on Facebook showing water flowing freely down San Gabriel Street, at the corner of Salamanca, while she and her neighbors have gone nearly two months without a single drop in their homes.
"San Gabriel is a street where water flows in both directions... upstream when it's pumped, and downstream when it overflows. And how it overflows," wrote Torres Hernández when publishing the reel, which has garnered more than 28,000 views.
In the video, recorded in the Los Mangos neighborhood of Matanzas, the journalist points the camera towards the water flowing down the street and poses a direct question to those responsible for the service: "If we don't have water, why did someone close that?"
According to Torres Hernández, the issue in his case is not the lack of fuel or power outages—though he acknowledges that these also have an impact—but rather poor handling of the network.
"In our case, it's not a broken engine, it's not a shortage of oil and electricity, it's a mismanaged key... a log covered in dirt."
Witnesses from the neighborhood report that a Hydrology brigade from Jovellanos arrived about two months ago, manipulated a valve, and covered a manhole with dirt.
Since then, the water completely stopped coming. "What we do know is that after that brigade left, not a single drop of water has entered our homes again, not even on those days when there was electricity and they pumped, but nothing. Nothing comes," the journalist reported.
Near the outlet, the local residents installed an improvised faucet where long lines form to collect water by hand. This same street is also used by the pipe that supplies the Pediatric Hospital and the tank of the Manuel Ascunce primary school, which serves almost the entire Los Mangos neighborhood.
The water crisis in Matanzas is structural and is exacerbated by multiple simultaneous factors. The epidemiological situation in Matanzas was classified as complex on May 8 by the authorities, amidst active outbreaks of hepatitis A in several municipalities.
According to data from April 2026, of the 518,000 residents in the province who receive water through pipes, more than 29,000 experience permanent shortages due to breaks in the networks.
87% of the supply system depends on the National Electric System, which means that each blackout halts the pumping; in Matanzas, the outages have reduced the supply to only two to four hours a day, far below the 16 hours needed.
In addition, more than 90 unaddressed water leaks reported in the province in June 2025, and an official response that is limited to meetings without concrete solutions. The only structural measure announced was the proposal to drill a new well, with no defined start date.
Torres Hernández, who served as president of the Union of Journalists of Cuba in Matanzas for seven years before resigning from her position in February 2023, concluded her statement with a phrase that captures the paradox of the city: "In Matanzas, there is a lot of water, we live surrounded by water, yet more and more residents of Matanzas do not have water. What a thing."
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