The body of a Cuban boy, just three years old, was found dead at the bottom of a sewer pit in Zone 6 of Alamar, municipality of East Havana, after several hours of intense searching that began Thursday afternoon, according to reports from the Nio reporting a crime on Facebook.
The search efforts began around 5:00 p.m. on Thursday when the child was reported missing. By 9:00 p.m., the little one had still not been found.
The delay in finding him had a specific cause: the pit was flooded with wastewater, and the contamination of the liquid made it impossible to see inside. According to a comment on Facebook from a neighbor identified as Orjadis Hernández, "techniques had to be employed to extract the water, and that's how the baby's body was located. At the bottom of the pit."
Witnesses reported on social media that near the site of the fall, the child's flip-flops were found. Inside the pit, they also noticed some glasses.
The testimonies collected by Nio regarding a crime indicate that the child was named Cristian and that his parents are from Guantánamo. The exact circumstances of how the boy reached that point and fell into the pit have not been clarified. No Cuban authority has issued an official statement on the case.
The question circulating among neighbors and on social media is unavoidable. "How did a three-year-old child end up there?" wrote the user Yuriel Fdez on Facebook, who also shared images of the location.
The tragedy in Alamar is not an isolated incident. In February 2025, 13-year-old Jonathan Oliva, died in Luyanó after being dragged by an uncovered sewer during flooding; his body was recovered in the bay of Havana the following day. The case sparked a wave of complaints about unprotected drains and sewers throughout the Island, but the issue was never resolved.
At the end of September, a neighbor in Aguada de Pasajeros, in Cienfuegos, reported an open pit without any protection, containing stagnant water and larvae, and warned: "When a child falls in, they will have to answer for it." What then sounded like a warning became a prophecy.
The sanitation infrastructure in Cuba has suffered from years of deterioration. Official Cuban data from 2024 revealed that the country had an inventory of over 800,000 cesspools, of which more than 14,000 required frequent cleaning due to construction issues, and there were nearly 10,000 pending cleaning requests with over 1,100 active dumping cases, primarily concentrated in Havana, Camagüey, Las Tunas, and Granma.
Technical studies cited by the Pan American Health Organization in April 2025 indicated that only 18.9% of the wastewater collected in Havana received treatment.
Filed under: