Living in this city comes with water anxiety.
14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, March 12, 2026 – We will have two days without water pumped in Havana. The news, barely announced in the official media, is confirmed by the dry pipes and silent sinks. In my building, most apartments have a storage tank to last when the lack of electricity prevents pumping from the cistern. But this time it’s different. There is a sense of the end and of living through an extreme period in which we may never again hear the roar of the motor that pumps the water up to the rooftop tank.
I don’t remember a single moment in my life in Havana when water wasn’t a concern. Living in this city comes with water anxiety. I, like every Cuban, am obsessed with saving every last drop. Under the kitchen counter, I have all sorts of containers. Bottles, buckets, jugs, and even a basin that always has to be full. If I could, I would turn anything into an artificial reservoir for when the pipes break down, the aqueduct shuts off, and fuel shortages paralyze the pumps. Years ago, we also created a rainwater harvesting system on the terrace of our apartment.
“Be like water,” Bruce Lee, one of my childhood idols, used to say. I was about seven or eight years old and would rush home from pushing a wheelbarrow with a tank from a street corner in Central Havana to sit in front of the television and watch that small man move like a wave, powerful and effective. There he was, silent and clean-shaven, in a world that, for me, was full of authoritarian beards and slogans shouted at the top of one’s lungs. “Take a bath, Yoani, and don’t waste the water you use; we have to flush the toilet,” my grandmother would tell me from the kitchen. “You have the bucket and the little pitcher ready,” she would emphasize.
The smell of burning garbage has returned after a few days’ respite.
Then I went to the school in the countryside and took with me a photo of that martial arts expert. With his narrow waist, he looked at me from the hostel locker as we counted the days when the water didn’t come and the reddish earth accumulated under our fingernails and on our sheets. He, with his gesture, called me to fluidity, and I was stuck in a social experiment where fungus multiplied on my feet and hunger gnawed in my stomach. “Take the shape of what surrounds you,” he seemed to suggest from his jet-black hair, already fading from the sun streaming through the blinds.
“Be like water,” I told myself, when they closed the hostel bathroom, overflowing with filth, because for a whole eleven days the precious liquid hadn’t reached that fourth floor. The day I left, I placed the Bruce Lee poster near my bunk and walked a good stretch along that Alquízar road, surrounded by parched fields where Fidel Castro’s latest folly, the Food Plan, was trying to materialize: the planting of bananas with a microjet system that sucked up the water meant for our showers and the sweet potatoes of the local farmers.
This Thursday in March, I woke up humming a song. “I’ll tell you, I came from a strange world,” I said to myself, the moment my feet touched the floor in the middle of a blackout. The smell of burning garbage has returned after a few days’ respite. Last night, we heard the echoes of a pot-banging protest in the Lawton area. The wind carried the clanging and the sound of shouts from a completely dark area. Noise, like water, has strange ways of spreading. Sometimes it arrives intermittently, and other times it seems as if the pot is only a few meters away, even though someone is banging it in another municipality. During the protests of 11 July 2021, those roars of euphoria continued to reach us even in the dead of night.
The water tank in my building is falling apart. When the cistern on the ground floor is full, it can fill the rooftop tank two and a half times. But the imposing structure, which sets this concrete block apart from others in the area and gives it a certain air of an airport control tower, is crumbling. It has supplied water to more than 140 apartments for four decades, and in all that time, it hasn’t received a single repair. Now the steel is exposed on its exterior, and the ship’s ladder that led to its top has lost some of its steps to rust.
The last one to go down that structure was my husband, Reinaldo. As he descended, the steps crumbled beneath his feet. Later, a crew came to assess the damage and estimated that repairing the building’s water tank would cost at least three million pesos. That was a couple of years ago, so it’s surely worth double… or triple that now. In that time, it has continued to leak fragments. A multi-family building has large “no man’s land” areas that the Cuban state long ago abandoned, and the residents can’t afford to maintain them. The plumbing system is one of the most affected in these buildings, which copied Eastern European architecture in this tropical Havana.
My neighbor says it won’t be long now, that we have maybe two weeks left until the whole regime collapses and things “start to get better.” I’m not as optimistic as she is. Sometimes I have nightmares about the rooftop water tank cracking like a pumpkin, and I don’t manage to warn the people walking down below in time. Other times I dream that I’m searching for and can’t find any more jugs, basins, or buckets to fill. An unexpected leak empties all my supplies, and I can only manage to store what fits in the palm of my hand.
“Be like water,” Bruce Lee repeats to me from somewhere deep within my memory. But how can I take shape and adapt to a world as strange as this one we inhabit? How can I endure in this city when the pipes are dry and the hum of the pump that fills the decaying colossus above our heads is no longer audible?
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