At the 19 de Noviembre station, on Tulipán Street, the mixture of mud, grease and excrement has formed a quagmire that threatens both the nose and the metal.
14ymedia, Havana, Natalia López Moya, November 16, 2025 — On Conill Street, in Nuevo Vedado, there is a smell that blots out the landscape. A thick stench that invades the sidewalk where every morning, almost in droves, the students of the José Miguel Pérez pre-university school pass by. For months now, the pestilence comes as a warning, a daily reminder that wastewater does not understand schedules or routines. The dark stream rises from a collapsed sewer and winds down the street.
The wastewater comes out through the gaps and edges of the metal lid, dragging bags and garbage along with it. In the course of its journey, the viscous liquid has been conquering ground until it has run into the tracks of the railway that leads to the 19 de Noviembre station on Tulipán Street. Along the way, the mixture of mud, grease and excrement has formed a muddy quagmire that threatens both the nose and the metal.
The image of the site this Saturday speaks for itself: a group of workers, with their boots sinking into the fresh mud, using their shovels to remove dirt that smells like a public toilet. Around them, the puddles reflect a blue sky that seems incompatible with the disaster under their feet.
One brigade embarks on what seems like an impossible mission to protect the iron tracks. They have no pumps, no new pipes or tools to rebuild the sewer system. They only have shovels, rubber boots and patience. Their “solution” — if you can call it that — is to open a trench under the rails to divert the water and prevent the tracks from ending up moving by losing solidity at the base. A kind of makeshift canal that, hopefully, will keep moisture at bay for a few days… or hours.
As they dig, the smell becomes stronger in the midday sun. And the irony too: in a city facing a resurgence of respiratory and stomach viruses, with overcrowded hospitals and pharmacies without basic medicines, this constant flow of wastewater seems like a direct provocation.
The neighbors are no longer surprised. They have long since learned to coexist with “temporary solutions,” those patches that fill speeches and press reports but never get to the heart of the problem. The routine consists of patching, diverting, covering, filling, re-opening, recovering. As if the entire city lives under an endless cycle of cosmetic repairs that do not heal, but rather become chronic. A Havana where life passes between spills of wastewater and the slow passage of a train that, hopefully, will manage to advance without sinking into the mud.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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