On unmonitored streets, enormous dumpsites grow large enough to block vehicle traffic
14ymedio, Dario Hernandez, Havana, 24 June 2026 / At the corner of San Martin and Escobar in Centro Habana, anyone who dares toss so much as a scrap of paper in the street is asking for trouble. After months of living alongside a dumpsite that had grown large enough to block traffic, residents cleaned everything up, posted warning signs, and hired improvised guards to stop anyone from dumping garbage there again.
Several notices stand out on the walls: “No dumping. 50,000-peso fine.” The signs bear the signature of the National Police and add that waste must be taken to Lealtad and Dragones. With no fuel for the trucks responsible for cleaning the city, residents have taken matters into their own hands to solve a serious public health problem on their own street.
The corner referenced on the signs, just a few blocks away, sits next to the Zanja police station and hosts one of the largest dumpsites in the area. The accumulation of waste occupies virtually an entire block and in some spots reaches two meters in height. In front of the Dragon Chino restaurant, passage is impossible due to the volume of refuse, and the smell forces pedestrians to cover their faces with masks.
At San Martin and Escobar, 14ymedio witnessed a heated argument between residents and a woman who tried to ignore the corner’s new rules. The woman wanted to get rid of an old cooking pot at the spot where she used to dump her garbage. Residents confronted her. One of them grabbed her by the arm while warning her that he would alert the block supervisor and report her to the police. The argument escalated over several minutes – the woman even threatened to hit the neighbor with the same pot – until she gave up and went to dump her garbage somewhere else.
“We had to take care of it ourselves because nobody was doing anything,” explained one resident, still agitated from the confrontation. A bicitaxi driver passing by at that moment took the rule-breaker’s side: “What’s the big deal? If the Government does nothing…”
The garbage problem is turning neighbors against each other. Every corner tries to protect itself on its own. Those that manage to stay clean simply push the problem onto nearby blocks. Some residents hire these guards and put up signs threatening fines. On one corner, there is even a notice that security cameras are in operation. [view video here]
Faced with months of accumulated waste, residents and the Communal Services agency themselves had taken to setting it on fire, with all the toxic consequences for the population. “Now we’ve entered a new phase,” sums up one neighborhood resident: “It’s the war of the corners.”
Images captured by this newspaper reflect what has already become an everyday reality in Centro Habana. Each community has begun to invent its own ways of surviving the garbage. Streets without hired guards have turned into enormous dumpsites, and it is common to see elderly people there picking through the refuse in search of food.
The corner is clean today, but the garbage has not disappeared – it has simply piled up somewhere else. Like the country’s structural problems, which move around without ever being solved and grow larger with each passing day.
Translated by GH
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