Cuban Gov. Abandons Obligation on Water in Sancti Spiritus
Communist Party suggests residents solve the problem with the private sector
More than two weeks ago, the pump that serves several apartment buildings by drawing water from the cistern and pushing it up to the tanks stopped working.
HAVANA TIMES – In the Los Olivos Apartment buildings in Sancti Spíritus, the days begin and end with the same sound: the sharp thud of buckets, the murmur of complaints, and the squeak of wheelbarrows. In the buildings numbered 14 through 24, daily life has turned into an endurance race since the pump that draws water from the cistern and pushes it up to the tanks stopped working more than two weeks ago.
Images from the area show what bureaucratic language prefers to call a “technical malfunction,” but for residents, it translates into sweat, waiting, discomfort, and frustration. Dozens of neighbors—mostly women, the elderly, and children—gather in front of the broken pump with tanks and buckets. It’s not an unusual scene; it repeats every day.
The story is as old as the state’s indifference. “We went to the Water Company, to Urban Planning, and then to the Government,” says a resident who asked not to be identified, fearing retaliation. “At each place, we got the same response: evasions, excuses, saying they don’t have the parts, that there’s no turbine.”
The institutions’ neglect became crystal clear in the proposal residents finally received from the Communist Party: that they should organize and pay a private individual to repair the pump. “For now, they have no way to solve the problem,” they were told. And just like that, with a curt phrase, the burden of public responsibility was offloaded onto the tired shoulders of a community barely managing to survive.
Multifamily buildings like those in Los Olivos were once a hallmark of socialist urban planning: identical concrete blocks promising dignity and community. But over time, like so many other pillars of the Cuban model, those buildings have crumbled—not just physically but also in terms of institutional support. The pipes collapse, the roofs leak, and the water pumps break down, and no one takes responsibility.
The State is increasingly distancing itself from its responsibilities. On the one hand, it maintains strict control to prohibit everything from installing gates in hallways without permission to setting up private businesses in common areas. But it no longer fulfills its obligations regarding collective infrastructure: façades, water pumps, electrical boxes, elevators (few as they are), and more.
The case of Los Olivos is not unique. It repeats in many parts of the country, where residents must pool money, find informal solutions, and hire improvised mechanics to maintain what should be part of the basic functioning of a system that calls itself “socialist”—but only when convenient. The de facto privatization of public services, managed by those most affected, has become the rule rather than the exception.
In Cuba, under-the-table solutions have become institutionalized in the shadow of a system that proclaims ownership over everything but refuses to take responsibility for its failures. Residents organize, collect funds, and arrange repairs, while officials deliver speeches and make excuses.
The water crisis also impacts hygiene, nutrition, and health. “What happens in homes where there are bedridden people, with limited mobility, or those who rely on a neighbor to carry up a bucket?” asks another resident. And that, day after day, adds to the rest of the country’s problems: long lines, blackouts, lack of transport, high prices, medicine shortages, as well as rising violence and drug use.
Some residents are still debating how to organize the collection of funds, since not everyone can contribute. If there are people who can’t even afford bread, how can you ask them for money to fix a pump that the State should be repairing? The photos show what official reports leave out. They show a desperate community: men and women dragging buckets, tensions flaring between neighbors, children playing in stagnant puddles as if unaware that what they’re experiencing isn’t normal—though it’s become routine.
This is also the story of resignation disguised as “creative resistance,” of how people have been taught to “figure it out,” to “make do,” to accept as natural what elsewhere would lead to resignations.
Meanwhile, the residents of the Los Olivos apartment buildings continue to gather, buckets in hand, hoping that this time there will be pressure—at least in the pipes. Because the other kind of pressure, the social kind, has long since dissipated among the broken hallways of forgotten buildings.
First published in Spanish by 14ymedio and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.