A video by the Cuban content creator Daudy Cuervo shows the dramatic accumulation of garbage on a street in La Habana, where waste invades a park and extends onto the public road where vehicles travel, while a man rummages through the debris.
Cuervo posted the clip on Facebook with a description that summarizes the outrage of thousands of Habaneros: "The damned hell, what a stench and what disgust."
The scene is no exception: it is the everyday portrait of a capital that has struggled for years to manage its own waste.
In February 2026, only 44 of the 106 garbage trucks in the capital were operational due to a lack of fuel and deterioration of the vehicle fleet, while Havana generates between 24,000 and 30,000 cubic meters of solid waste per day, a figure that far exceeds the system's capacity.
The garbage crisis in Havana made international headlines that same month, when Prime Minister Manuel Marrero urged Cubans to collect trash using their own resources.
The regime has responded with emergency campaigns that do not address the underlying problem. In October and November 2025, the so-called "Operation Cleanup" mobilized soldiers, recruits, police officers, and state workers, and collected 396,157 cubic meters of trash in just over twenty days, according to Governor Yanet Hernández Pérez.
However, the garbage accumulated again within weeks, confirming that it was merely a cosmetic cleanup without any structural solutions.
On May 17th, a waste fire revealed the collapse in the neighborhood of Los Sitios, where garbage had been piling up for weeks.
The health consequences of so many dumps in public spaces are serious. Epidemiologists link the accumulation of waste to outbreaks of leptospirosis, hepatitis A, dengue, and oropouche.
The problem is not limited to Havana: cities like Matanzas, Santa Clara, and Holguín are experiencing similar situations, creating a national public health crisis that the regime of Díaz-Canel has neither been able to nor seems willing to address in a structural way.
Meanwhile, content creators like Daudy Cuervo continue to document what the government would rather hide: a country that, as a November 2025 report titled, "lives in garbage."
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