The latest protests in Cuba are about thirst: Over 600,000 people live without drinking water | International

On Tuesday night, residents of the La Rosita neighborhood in San Miguel del Padrón, a municipality on the outskirts of Havana, took to the streets after more than two weeks without drinking water. Badiela Ayala was there, part of the crowd banging pots, shouting “Turn on the water!” and stopping traffic in the middle of Calzada de Güines. “People from the government came to the scene,” Ayala says. “Thank God they brought us water trucks, because we haven’t had any for more than 17 days.” To date, no one has solved the basic problem: If the water the government sent to quell the protests in the streets runs out, there will again be a lack of water for drinking, cooking, washing clothes and bathing. “What will we do if that happens? Well, the same thing we did now,” Ayala says. “We will take to the streets again.”

The water crisis in Cuba did not begin yesterday, but the general deterioration of the country’s situation, the impossibility of adequately maintaining the pipes and the lack of fuel have significantly aggravated the problem, since the water sector is the second largest consumer of electricity in the country. The Cuban authorities have acknowledged that more than 600,000 people are suffering from water shortages. José Antonio Hernández, president of the Economic Group for Water and Sanitation, told the official press that in Havana alone, some 130,000 consumers are affected by the water shortage and that in several inland provinces, thousands of consumers are without supply.

The official cited the failures of pumping stations and the constant power outages that Cubans have been struggling with for some time and that have forced them to protest publicly on more than one occasion as the causes. Another problem is the so-called leaks. Hernández himself said that at the end of 2023 there were about 2,000 of these water leaks in Havana that had not been repaired “for days and months.”

However, the problem seems to be bigger than the authorities are willing to admit. According to a study by the Cuban Observatory for Human Rights (OCDH), in reality there are many more people in the country without access to drinking water. “We question the figure given by the government. Our study on social rights in 2023 found that 17% of respondents did not have access to drinking water. That’s about 663,000 households, so if we assume three people per household, we could be talking about 1.9 million people,” says Yaxys Cires, the organization’s strategy director. “But we are also concerned about another significant number of households, namely the 27% that only receive water less than four days a week and the 40% that receive it between four and six days. The majority of the population does not have stable and permanent access to water.”

A “desperate” situation

In western Cuba, in the province of Pinar del Río, Lismary Mariño says she has been without water for over a month. She has 55-litre buckets for cooking. When they run out, she refills them in other areas near her town. She also has two small tanks on the roof of her house that guarantee her 15 days of water, and which are now almost empty. “The truth is that this is a desperate situation,” says Mariño. “I have a small child, my neighbours also have children and elderly people in their care. There are so many things that weigh us down.”

There seems to be no clear solution, at least not in the short term, to the problem, which officials have described as a “very complex situation.” Antonio Rodríguez Rodríguez, president of the National Institute of Hydraulic Resources (INRH), made that clear the day President Miguel Díaz-Canel asked him when the water shortage would be resolved. “To give you a date when we can solve the problems would not be fair,” Rodríguez said, being as honest as possible. “We hope that, realistically and based on our current pace, we will have a better situation next year. But that does not mean that we will solve all the problems with leaks, blockages, water supply and other things.”

Last year, the president of the INRH said that 478 urban centers were totally or partially without water; that about 2.7 million people received water every three or more days; and that about 475,000 Cubans received water by tanker trucks. Although the government has tried to solve the water problem by using tanker trucks, they often cannot be transported due to a lack of fuel or tires. In addition, an entire informal market has sprung up in which Cubans who can afford it pay up to 8,000 pesos ($25) for one of these tanker trucks.

The constant complaints about the poor maintenance of the water management system and the increase in sewage in the Cuban capital are also attributed to the poor work of Aguas de La Habana, the company in charge of water, sewage and sanitation services. However, today there are very few people who want to work for the state-owned company. Rodríguez told the official press that “valuable workers and specialists have decided to leave the sector in search of higher salaries.”

Karen Isasi, a resident of San Miguel del Padrón who has been without water for two weeks, went to the Aguas de La Habana office to get an answer and was told that the director was on vacation. Then another employee wrote down the complaints and told her she would have to wait. “I have four small children living in my house and being without water is a nuisance,” she says. “I have to get water from the neighbors’ houses, who do me the favor so I can cook and do other chores.”

Isasi’s neighbors also took to the streets a few days ago to demand a response. They were not the only ones. Other local demonstrations demanding a solution to the water shortage have been reported recently: residents of Centro Habana stopped traffic on Reina Street; others from Villa Clara in the center of the island shouted “We want water” after two months of drought; several mothers with children protested publicly, accompanied by buckets and plastic tanks. The government has deployed its police on several of these occasions, tried to calm the unrest, sent water trucks to solve the immediate problem and promised a solution that, at the moment, does not seem to be in sight.

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