Ana Hurtado, a propagandist for the Cuban regime, posted on her Facebook profile a question expressing surprise at the accumulation of waste in El Vedado, one of the most central neighborhoods in Havana.
"Why are there municipalities in Havana (the city I know) that look clean and are well-maintained, yet Vedado, with its hospitals and being the center of the city, is filled with tons of garbage? It's incomprehensible," Hurtado wrote in a Facebook post on Saturday.
The reaction is noteworthy because it comes from a figure who typically denies the structural problems of Cuba and collaborates with official media outlets such as Cubadebate, TeleSUR, and Al Mayadeen.
What Hurtado describes as "incomprehensible" is, for Cubans, a reality that has been documented for years. The streets of Vedado have been overflowing with filth for months, with overflowing tanks and makeshift dumps at corners like 25 and H, 15 and K, and Neptuno Street.
The crisis has well-identified structural causes: in February of this year, only 44 out of 106 garbage collection trucks in the capital were operational —just 41.5% of the fleet— halted due to a shortage of diesel and mechanical deterioration.
Havana generates between 24,000 and 30,000 cubic meters of solid waste per day, a figure that significantly exceeds the effective capacity of the collection system.
The lack of waste collection has resulted in the burning of refuse in public spaces, an increase in flies and rodents, and health risks such as dengue and chikungunya.
In June, the Cuban government announced an emergency plan with 49 measures and the deployment of brigades, yet the situation did not improve in a sustained manner. China also provided electric tricycles to assist with collection, a solution that did not address the underlying problem.
Hurtado's profile adds a layer of irony to the episode. In April of this year, she published an article denying that Cuba is a dictatorship, attributing that label to the "dominant view" of Europe and the United States.
In July, she proposed a pot-banging protest in front of the U.S. embassy in Havana, which she referred to as the "embassy of hate."
In October 2024, the Spanish justice system condemned Ana Hurtado to pay 10,000 euros to the Cuban doctor Lucio Enríquez Nodarse for defamation, and ordered her to publish the ruling in the same media outlets where she made the offensive statements.
Hurtado herself, married to Senén Casas Más, a key operator in the inner circle of Alejandro Castro Espín, summarized her position in an interview published by the official Granma in May 2022: "I have been happy defending Cuba."
Meanwhile, the residents of Vedado have been reporting dumpsters that are causing infestations of flies and mice near health institutions, a situation that is not at all incomprehensible to them: it is the direct consequence of decades of collapse in public services.
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