A Cuban walked through the streets of the Havana municipality of Cerro and recorded the massive accumulation of waste that turns the neighborhood into what he himself compared to the Ciénaga de Zapata, in a video that has garnered tens of thousands of views on Facebook.
"They told me that the Cerro has the key, no, what the Cerro has is garbage," says the author of the reel, Daudy Cuervo, as the camera captures heaps of waste piled along the road.
The comments on the video reflect the desperation of those who live that reality every day. "This is our earthquake, but there are no rescuers here, just groups of the incompetent," wrote one user.
Another was more direct: "The government is turning Cuba into a disgusting swamp."
The indignation is not just metaphorical. "They are sadly destroying my country; I don’t know how much longer this odyssey that Cubans are living amid garbage dumps, mosquitoes, blackouts, a lack of humanity, a lack of everything will last," lamented another person in the comments section.
Someone summed up the situation in three words: "Epidemic. Horror. Sadness."
El Cerro is facing a series of overlapping crises. Days ago, residents of the municipality protested and blocked avenues with buckets and containers, demanding electricity and water after five days without power due to a damaged transformer.
In April, a mother from the neighborhood reported a fly infestation at the corner of Zequeira and San Joaquín, where there is an improvised dump; the traps filled up in just one hour.
In March, desperate neighbors set fire to a garbage dump as a form of protest.
The collapse of sanitation in El Cerro is part of a structural crisis affecting the entire capital. Since February 2026, only 44 of the 106 waste collection trucks in Havana are operational due to a lack of diesel and mechanical damage.
The city generates between 24,000 and 30,000 cubic meters of solid waste daily, but up to 23,814 cubic meters go uncollected each day. The capital needs between 20,000 and 30,000 containers, yet only has 10,000.
In the face of the collapse, the regime has resorted to military service recruits to collect trash in the streets of Havana, a practice documented this Thursday by activist Silverio Portal, who described the scene as an expression of "67 years of socialist failure."
Cuba ended 2025 with at least 81,909 cases of dengue and chikungunya and 65 official deaths, and in 2026 the outbreak remained active with over 2,800 cases in 134 municipalities.
The Deputy Minister of Public Health recently warned on official television that the country could face a new epidemic with all four serotypes of dengue circulating simultaneously.
The government of President Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged in December that it cannot clean the capital or pay street sweepers a decent wage.
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