A video published this Friday on Facebook shows the Trillo Park, in the Cayo Hueso neighborhood, turned into an open-air dump, with mounds of waste invading the public space of one of the oldest and most iconic parks in Havana.
The author of the video, Maykel Chapotin, recorded for 51 seconds the accumulation of cardboard boxes, plastic bags, clothing, fabrics, and organic waste that spread across the area of the park, located between San Rafael, San Miguel, Aramburu, and Hospital streets, in the Centro Habana municipality.
"The waste from Trillo Park has already exceeded the limits," Chapotin wrote when sharing the images, which garnered nearly 5,000 views in just a few hours.
The complaint was not limited to the visual: "Amidst the plague and the worms, where are we going to end up?" asked the author, describing the health conditions of the area with a phrase that captures the indignation of those who live or pass through that part of the capital.
Trillo Park is no ordinary space. Established in the first decade of the 20th century, it houses the statue of General Quintín Bandera and, since 2009, the Palace of Rumba, dedicated to a genre that was declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2016.
That the space has been buried under garbage illustrates just how far the waste collection crisis has exceeded any limits in Havana.
The situation is not an isolated incident, but rather the most recent expression of a structural collapse in waste collection that impacts the entire capital. At the beginning of this year, only 44 of the 106 garbage trucks in Havana were operational, halted by a shortage of diesel and the mechanical deterioration of the fleet.
The city generates between 24,000 and 30,000 cubic meters of solid waste per day, but the system is only able to collect a fraction: up to 23,814 cubic meters remain uncollected each day.
The infrastructure deficit exacerbates the situation: Havana has only 10,000 containers when it would need between 20,000 and 30,000 to meet actual demand.
The result is the proliferation of micro-dumps in streets, vacant lots, and parks throughout the capital, with particular impact on densely populated municipalities like Centro Habana, where a mountain of garbage blocked an intersection last June.
The consequences go beyond aesthetic discomfort or unpleasant odors. In mid-June, the Deputy Minister of Public Health Carilda Peña warned that Cuba could face a new dengue epidemic, fueled precisely by the combination of accumulated garbage, water leaks, and prolonged power outages that promote the breeding of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, with the four serotypes of the virus circulating simultaneously in the country.
International media such as The New York Times en Español and Infobae have described the situation as a public health emergency. The regime has implemented partial measures like the so-called "Cleaning Operation," but sources agree that these efforts have been insufficient to address the underlying issue: decades of disinvestment and a waste management system that has been on the brink of collapse for years.
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