A video shared on Wednesday on Facebook shows the corner of Ánimas and Monserrate in Old Havana, transformed into an open-air dump, with enormous mounds of bags, cardboard, and waste piled up in front of deteriorated colonial buildings in the capital's Historic Center.
The images, captured from the sidewalk in front of the Balaguer building, behind the Museum of Fine Arts, depict a broken concrete sidewalk, littered with waste that has not been collected for days, as well as a trash container completely melted by fire.
The video has accumulated nearly 47,500 views and more than 140 comments on the social network, with reactions ranging from indignation to resignation.
The contrast with the recent past is striking. For nearly four decades, historian Eusebio Leal (1942-2020) transformed the Historic Center into a global benchmark for urban conservation, by restoring hundreds of buildings, squares, and colonial palaces since he took over the direction of the Office of the Historian of the City in 1981.
In 1982, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) declared the Historic Center of Old Havana a World Cultural Heritage Site.
In 2016, Havana was awarded the title of “New7Wonders City of the Modern World”, chosen in an annual contest organized by the Swiss foundation New7Wonders.
In 2020, the Canadian online travel company, Flight Network, considered the capital of the largest archipelago in the Caribbean among the 50 most beautiful cities in the world.
Just six years after Leal's passing, many of the restored streets are buried under tons of uncollected trash.
Cubans who commented on the video did not conceal their discomfort. "If Eusebio Leal comes back to life, he will die again," wrote one user.
Another summed up the scene with a single phrase: "Look at the capital of Cuba, what a horror." A third was more categorical: "This is how all of Havana is in all its municipalities."
The garbage collection crisis in Havana has left only 44 out of 106 collection trucks operational due to a lack of fuel, resulting in up to 23,814 cubic meters of uncollected waste each day.
The government of Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged in December 2025 that it cannot clean the capital or fairly pay the street cleaners.
On several occasions, young people from the Military Service have been mobilized to collect trash using shovels and bags, without a sustained improvement in the situation.
The crisis is not limited to Old Havana. A few days ago, a fire consumed part of the garbage pile at the corner of 15 and K, in El Vedado, just meters away from the national headquarters of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.
Likewise, the corner of Monte and Águila, in Jesús María, was reported as another makeshift dumping site with the same pattern of accumulation.
The health consequences are severe. Cuba closed 2025 with at least 81,909 cases of dengue and chikungunya and 65 official deaths, an outbreak that The New York Times directly linked to the waste crisis.
The historian Julio César González Pagés described the situation candidly. "Havana among garbage and feces enters summer with little water, hygiene, and medications, reviving the worst of its colonial era", González Pagés stated in a recent reflection where he drew a parallel with 1735, when colonial authorities first ordered the systematic cleaning of the streets of Havana.
Filed under: