‘Cannibalized’ cars, collapsed buildings and abandoned structures accompany daily life in Havana
14ymedio, Havana, Yoani Sánchez, Generation Y, September 14, 2026 / In Havana, we don’t walk through streets, but rather through the interior of a shipwreck. Debris is everywhere: a propped-up building, a broken pipe that no one fixes, a mountain of garbage, the skeleton of a collapsed building. We have become so accustomed to the rubble that we hardly see it anymore. We sidestep around the gap, dodge the chunk of concrete, and keep going.
On Ayestarán Street, as on so many others, there is a great variety of ruins. Under a zinc roof and on the dry grass, several disassembled cars are piled up. One is missing its front end; of another, barely the body remains; a third conserves something resembling its former form. They are corpses stripped of doors, windows, engines, and every screw that might serve to keep another vehicle running.
The official entities seem to have lost the energy to remove the remains, because getting rid of a ruin requires resources that simply don’t exist.
It is difficult to imagine the moment when they were new. Perhaps one transported a reporter from the state-run press to a boring People’s Power assembly. Another might have had as a regular passenger a manager in a tight guayabera, with a chauffeur waiting at the door. There was a time when ministries, companies, and state agencies had enough fuel, spare parts, and cars to transport their officials and employees.
Of that spoilage remains these shells that form part of the landscape. The official entities seem to have lost even the energy to retire the remains, because dismantling a ruin requires resources that no longer exist.
The worst thing about living among the wreckage isn’t the hideousness, but the habit. We walk past it, incorporate it into our routines, and end up accepting it as an inevitable part of the scenery.
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