The Recurring Floods in Havana
HAVANA TIMES – The fury didn’t come from the sea, with the roar of a hurricane, but from the sky—gray and indifferent. It was a slow agony. First, the heavy drops, announcing the arrival of the rain. Then, a constant, relentless downpour lasting for hours. It turned the streets of Havana into raging rivers. It wasn’t a surprise; it was the repetition of a familiar nightmare. Once again, the cruel reminder: the collapse of a sewage system that has been crying for help for decades.
The smell is the first thing that hits you. A nauseating mixture of stagnant water, spilled fuel, and the stench of garbage carried by the current from the dumps along the streets. The water rushes down from the city, desperately searching for an outlet that the clogged sewers deny it.
In many parts of Havana, the situation is Dantean. Bicycle taxis turn into fragile canoes. Drivers become anonymous heroes, risking their lives to cross what was a street yesterday and is now a canal. Residents of ground-floor apartments watch as mud and sewage invade their living rooms. It’s a forced exodus within their own homes—they lift furniture, appliances, and memories, waiting for the water to recede.
A Problem that Smells of the 19th Century
Experts—those whose voices often get lost in bureaucracy—don’t hesitate to point to the root of the problem. Much of Havana’s sewage system dates back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was designed for a smaller, less populated city with a different climate pattern. Today, it’s collapsed, saturated, and broken. The pipes, corroded by time and lack of maintenance, are incapable of handling the flow of heavy rain, something increasingly common in our era of the climate crisis.
Climate change is no abstraction in the Caribbean. It means the intensification of weather events. The so-called “design rains”—those the system was built to handle—have been surpassed by more frequent extreme events. But even during ordinary rainfall, the system shows alarming signs. Havana floods not only because of the force of nature, but because of the indolence accumulated over decades.
The Professionals’ Paradox: Knowing but Unable to Act
There’s another layer of frustration in this situation: that of professionals—the engineers, hydrologists, and workers of the Water and Sewer Company. They know the solutions. They have blueprints, diagnose the bottlenecks, and identify the critical areas. But they face a wall of material shortages and, at times, institutional apathy.
The lack of resources is overwhelming: not enough suction trucks, replacement pipes are a luxury, and protective gear is insufficient. They operate in a state of perpetual emergency—patching holes instead of rebuilding the road. In some cases, lack of oversight and a “make-do” culture have led to fixes that are nothing but temporary patches, which ultimately worsen the problem: illegal connections, solid waste dumped into drains, and construction that doesn’t follow technical plans.
A Story that Repeats Itself
The press archives are a catalog of repeated disasters. Yet the promises remain the same: the drains will be cleaned, the networks rehabilitated, and new machinery purchased. But once the waters recede, institutional memory seems to vanish—until the next storm. Havanans resign themselves, clean up, rebuild with what little they have. They look to the sky not with hope, but with fear. Havana—that beautiful and decaying city that rises before the sea—has spent too long fighting two enemies: the fury of a changing climate and the weight of its own neglect.
Read more from the diary of Safie M. Gonzalez here on Havana Times.