The Cuban activist Guillermo Rodríguez Sánchez shared this Sunday a video showing how fruits and vegetables are sold on the streets of Havana, surrounded by piles of garbage, which the author himself ironically described as the "exquisite hygiene conditions under which food is sold to the population."
The clip, lasting one minute and 34 seconds, shared on their Facebook profile, captures an outdoor market where pineapples, bananas, and tubers are displayed under tents and directly on the ground, with residential buildings in the background and waste accumulated in the immediate surroundings.
The scene is not an isolated incident. In recent days, the streets of Centro Habana have been blocked by mountains of garbage, including Neptuno Street and the intersection of San José and Escobar, which have also been documented in videos shared on social media.
A biologist who commented in one of the recent videos about the situation in Centro Habana summed up the risk with a straightforward phrase: "An epidemic of gastroenteritis could break out in Havana at any moment."
The collapse of the collection system has a structural cause: since February 2026, only 44 of the 106 collection trucks in the capital are operational, halted due to a lack of fuel and mechanical failure.
The city generates between 24,000 and 30,000 cubic meters of solid waste per day, but the actual capacity leaves up to 23,814 cubic meters daily uncollected. The capital has only 10,000 containers when it would need between 20,000 and 30,000.
The government of Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged in December 2025 that it cannot clean the capital or provide decent pay for the street sweepers. The so-called Cleaning Operation in October and November of that year collected nearly 396,157 cubic meters of waste in just over twenty days, but the garbage accumulated again within weeks, confirming that it was a cosmetic solution without structural change.
The accumulation of waste has direct and documented health consequences. Cuba ended 2025 with at least 81,909 cases of dengue and chikungunya and officially reported 65 fatalities, in an outbreak that The New York Times directly linked to the garbage crisis in a report published in May.
In 2026, the outbreak remained active with over 2,800 cases in 134 municipalities across 14 provinces. On June 12, the Deputy Minister of Public Health, Carilda Peña, warned on official television that Cuba could face a new epidemic due to the simultaneous circulation of the four serotypes of the virus.
Epidemiologists also link garbage dumps to outbreaks of leptospirosis, hepatitis A, and oropouche, and the arrival of the rainy season in June further exacerbates the risk of proliferation of the Aedes aegypti mosquito.
The sale of food, along with areas of waste, adds an additional risk of food contamination in an environment lacking adequate refrigeration, with unstable water supply and virtually nonexistent health controls.
The burning of trash by desperate neighbors has also led to fires affecting historic buildings. The Parish of the Escolapios, in Centro Habana, suffered the destruction of its side door in the early hours of June 19, marking the fourth incident of this kind in less than three months.
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