A Cuban known on TikTok as «La Yanis ..flaca» (@yanisgomez122494) went viral after showing the homemade system she devised to have water in her home: collecting rainwater with a tank, after more than 30 days without a single drop reaching the sink in her house.
"Since water doesn't reach our cistern, it's now been over thirty days without water on this trip, so what we did was this Cuban invention to collect a bit of rainwater; thank God it drizzled, huh!" explains the woman in the video.
With the rainwater collected, the Cuban woman cleans, flushes the toilets, and washes dishes. "Rainwater, sir? Yes, I'm using this water to clean and flush the toilets; I also use it for washing," she says with a naturalness that reflects how normalized deprivation has become on the island.
The condition of her home adds another layer of hardship to her story: the house has leaks that make it, in her own words, "rain more inside my house than outside." Despite this, the woman is grateful for every sprinkle. "One always appreciates the rain because what is bad for me is good for others since it moistens the soil and can produce even if it's just food right here in Cuba, which isn't great, but it's something to eat," she reflects at the end of the video.
The case of this Cuban is not an exception. Almost 2.7 million Cubans are suffering from a shortage of drinking water, and nearly 10 million have intermittent supply throughout the country, according to reports from May 2026.
In Havana, 376,055 people were affected by water service issues on May 15 due to breaks in the network and lack of electricity for pumping. A survey by Cubadata conducted between February and March 2026 revealed that 46.6% of respondents face a shortage of water daily or several times a week, and 71.4% at least once a week.
The power outages are exacerbating the water crisis as they interrupt the pumps that transport water through the hydraulic networks. In Ciego de Ávila, residents reported 36 days without being able to store water due to the combination of spaced-out supply cycles and power cuts. In Holguín, entire communities have gone for more than five months without a single drop from the networks.
In light of this reality, Cubans have turned ingenuity into a tool for survival. Systems for capturing rainwater using cut plastic bottles as funnels, makeshift hoses, and recycled containers are being documented and going viral on TikTok, where homemade inventions to survive the crisis have become a social testimony phenomenon that shows, without filters, the collapse of basic services after 67 years of dictatorship.
In 2024, more than 600,000 people in Cuba had to rely on tanker trucks for their water supply, and for 80% of the users, the supply cycles exceeded 15 days, according to data from the National Institute of Hydraulic Resources.
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