A video shared this Friday on social media shows one of the side streets of the Cuatro Caminos Shopping Center in Havana completely flooded with murky green water, along with plastic debris, charred cardboard, and mud.
The images were published on the Facebook profile of user Iván Rosa Armenteros, who accompanied the recording with a message that summarizes the outrage of many Cubans: "They have turned this country into a tremendous mess. Even beauty becomes tiresome."
According to one of the comments under the post, the green water has been stagnant at that spot for over three months without any action taken by the authorities.
"It is a shopping area and very busy traffic, nothing is being done to channel that green water, which is polluting the community," he stated.
Other neighbors described an even more widespread situation. "My block is also filled with sewage water on both sides, and no one is doing anything. Today, the same neighbors are digging trenches because we've been dealing with this for months," wrote one person.
Resignation also surfaces among those who reacted to the video. "Most Cubans have normalized this precariousness; that's why Cuba is getting worse over the years," lamented another commentator.
Someone else pointed out with irony the contradiction of the State: "End. Then they want to go to the house to impose fines for mosquitoes."
"This is how Havana looks, with all its municipalities included at 100%, and this is how we survive, because God is great and has not unleashed another epidemic, without potable water, without electricity to keep food safe, without medicines," summarized one commentator. Another was more direct: "Cuba is destroyed, and it hurts."
Cuatro Caminos is a high-traffic commercial area that has historically experienced recurring flooding due to inadequate drainage, but the current crisis adds the complication of uncollected waste.
The Cuban capital has a deficit in waste collection resources. Of the 106 collection trucks available at the beginning of the year, only 44 were still operational, which is 41% of the fleet, incapacitated due to a lack of fuel and mechanical deterioration.
The city, with a population of over 1.8 million inhabitants, generates between 24,000 and 30,000 cubic meters of solid waste daily, but up to 23,814 cubic meters remain uncollected each day.
The government acknowledged at the end of 2025 that it cannot clean the capital or pay sweepers a decent wage, an admission that has not been accompanied by real solutions.
The situation at Cuatro Caminos is not an isolated case. In recent weeks, garbage overflowed in Parque Trillo in Centro Habana, and the deputy director of the Office of the Historian, Perla Rosales, acknowledged that Old Havana can't stay clean for even two hours following a sanitation effort.
The health consequences are severe. Cuba ended 2025 with at least 81,909 official cases of dengue and chikungunya, and 65 deaths.
More than 500,000 residents of Havana remained without regular access to drinking water in July. Meanwhile, days earlier it was reported that cracked pipes can draw in wastewater into the system when power outages shut down the pumps, which further increases the risk to the population.
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