Under an intense downpour, two ownerless dogs search for scraps of food in a mountain of garbage deposited on an interior street in the Santos Suárez neighborhood, Diez de Octubre municipality, south of Havana.
In a dilapidated state warehouse across the street, a group of people in capes and rubber boots waited to buy the rice and sugar sold through the ration book. Other neighbors braved the floods in the streets and lined up to buy bread freely. An employee announced that “due to inclement weather, the last run of bread was not safe. Please do not disturb” and with a pull he closed the grill of the sales stand.
The people did not leave. He didn’t pay any attention to it. “They tell you that so that people leave and sell bread on the left at a higher price,” said a weak old man. A guy in a quarrelsome tone pointed out: “If they act stupid, I’ll sneak into the bakery and take all the bread I see. Enough of the faggot (nonsense). This is fire. “I’m not going to let my children go hungry.”
In a quarters located on Calzada de Diez de Octubre between Carmen and Vista Alegre, the rains caused the roof to partially collapse. Liudmila, 56 years old, the owner, began to store her belongings in cardboard boxes due to the threat of collapse. Her neighbors helped her move the refrigerator, an old cathode tube television, and cooking pots to her friend’s house. Everyone’s prediction was that the precarious housing was going to collapse.
“I live with that anxiety every time it rains or a cyclone passes through Havana. My room has been declared uninhabitable for twenty years. It looks like it’s going to fall, but it doesn’t. It resists storms, although a piece of the ceiling or a wall always falls off. It’s falling apart. Like Cuba,” he says. And he comments that Housing officials have made him a thousand promises that they never keep. “They have told me that they are going to give me an apartment in the Bahia neighborhood or that they have already approved the materials with which I can build a house. One story after another. If I don’t repair the room on my own, one day I will be in the news because a collapse killed me.”
A source consulted by the independent newspaper 14ymedio, said that until Friday, June 21, the recent rains caused at least 19 partial collapses in Havana, leaving one dead and several injured after a wall collapsed in a house located in the Calzada del Cerro, between Patria and Carvajal. Diario de Cuba reported that in just 24 hours, the province of Matanzas, about 100 kilometers east of the capital, has been the scene of two landslides, fortunately without fatalities or injuries.
Kenia, a mother of two children, lives in the Arroyo Naranjo municipality, south of the city, and every time it rains she has to place several plastic buckets and vessels in the living room of her house where the water that leaks from the ceiling falls. “Look if the rains have been intense, the water I collect from the leaks is enough for me to flush the toilet and clean the house. The worry is that we are sleeping and the ceiling falls on our heads.”
Eight years ago, welfare allocated Kenya some cement, tiles and roof waterproofing. “Also a bricklayer and his assistant to solve the problem of leaks. He came to the television when they finished several sidewalks, put lights on the street and repaired two or three houses in the area. But the work was botched. After a few months The leaks returned. The kitchen tiles peeled off and the walls began to crack with the first downpour. Here in Cuba everything is propaganda,” says Kenia.
Eduardo, an engineer, residing in Guanabacoa, southwest of Havana, considers that what Cubans are going through is a kind of psychological war between the authorities and the population. “Almost nothing works except repression: if you protest they immediately put you in prison. Where I live they haven’t paved the streets for three decades. They also don’t repair the water leaks and there are no street lights. 70 percent of the houses in the neighborhood are in fair or poor construction condition. Since 2006 I have been requesting construction materials to repair my house. The answer is always the same, wait or they don’t have a budget. These June rains have not only worsened the situation, due to the leaks in the roof and. the walls of the house, now all the streets are flooded because they do not collect the garbage. To make matters worse, we have constant blackouts and we have been without water for ten days. It is an ordeal to live in Cuba.”
Eduardo assures that he has “used all the channels to explain to me why there is no water in various areas of Havana. Nobody gives me a coherent answer. It’s all slime and nonsense. When there is drought, they are justified by the lack of rain. When it rains, they blame the downpours for damaging the aqueduct. There is no one who understands these people (the authorities).”
According to an official from Aguas de La Habana “the causes of the water supply problems in the capital have been diverse. First was the fuel deficit to pump water to different Havana locations. And nine days ago it was caused by a break in the South Basin. When the work was completed yesterday, Saturday, a breakdown occurred again in the 78-inch pipe that prevented the water supply service from being resumed.”
The population complains that the community service does not collect garbage and this causes waste carried by the rain to clog the city’s sewers and drains. “We live surrounded by filth,” says Guillermo, a resident of the Luyanó neighborhood, while pointing with his hand to the garbage can on the corner and the cans and papers that people throw in the street. “The water hasn’t come in for eight days and they haven’t picked up the garbage for a week. The stench is unbearable because there are people who throw nylon bags with feces into the trash. It is as if we live in the primitive age.”
Even in urbanizations where wealthy families usually live, such as Vedado, Nuevo Vedado or Miramar, there are water leaks and due to the negligence of communal services, garbage accumulates, causing flooding in some places. Or landslides happen, like the one that recently occurred in a property in the Playa municipality, west of the capital.
The summer heat, the rains and any other natural contingency reveal the terrible management of basic services by the local authorities in Havana. The regime assures that Cuba is not a failed state. But he’s going that way.
