The Cuban comedian Ulises Toirac once again highlighted the garbage crisis in Havana this Tuesday with a five-second video posted on Facebook, where he depicted the collapse of waste collection services in the Cuban capital with irony and colloquial language.
"In every block a basuplen / in every neighborhood an infection / Block by block / neighborhood by town / filthy, the mess," wrote Toirac, paraphrasing "La Canción de los CDR," composed by Eduardo Ramos, a member of the Grupo de Experimentación Sonora del ICAI and originally performed by Sara González.
The video shows images of blue municipal containers completely overflowing, with waste spilled onto the pavement of a tree-lined street in Havana.
The post accumulated over 10,000 views, 705 reactions, and a hundred comments, reflecting the significance the topic holds among Cubans.
This is not the first time that Toirac has raised concerns about this situation. In February, he warned about the risks of burning waste in public spaces and shared a photo of a "mountain of garbage" in the Playa municipality, commenting: "If this is the case in this proletarian-aristocratic neighborhood... I don't want to see the rest."
In May, he criticized the government for prioritizing mobilizations and propaganda instead of addressing the garbage issues and blackouts, and just three days before this publication, he described Cuba as a "maze without a solution" where "it's no longer the light at the end of the tunnel... it's that there is no tunnel."
The complaint from the comedian reflects a structural crisis that, in 2026, has reached critical levels. The city generates between 24,000 and 30,000 cubic meters of waste per day, but the collection system only processes between 16,000 and 17,000, leaving as much as 23,814 cubic meters daily uncollected.
The collapse has specific causes: in February, only 44 out of the 106 garbage collection trucks in the capital were operational, halted due to fuel shortages and the mechanical deterioration of an unmaintained fleet.
The infrastructure is equally insufficient. Havana has only 10,000 containers when it needs between 20,000 and 30,000 to meet the city's actual demand.
In light of the service collapse, the burning of trash in public spaces has become a widespread improvised solution, worsening health risks. The New York Times en Español documented the connection between waste accumulation and the spread of dengue, chikungunya, leptospirosis, and hepatitis A in the capital.
The magnitude of the problem even compelled the Cuban state press to acknowledge the situation in February, an unusual occurrence given the usual official silence regarding the system's failures.
Toirac, one of the most recognized comedians in Cuba with over 45 years of artistic experience, has turned his social media into a platform for sustained criticism against the government of Miguel Díaz-Canel, addressing issues ranging from blackouts and repression to poor economic management and, repeatedly, the problem of garbage that causes illness and suffocates Havana.
Filed under: