HAVANA, Sep 30 (Reuters) – A Cuban housewife, Yuamilka Hechavarria, was sleeping last Tuesday when water flooded the cistern of the crumbling building where she lives in Old Havana.
She sprang from bed, running blindly through the darkness caused by a blackout to fill a bucket before the tap ran dry. It was the first time in two months that her building received water.
This scene is repeated daily in neighborhoods across the Cuban capital, Havana, where power outages, aggravated by the United States’ oil blockade, have paralyzed the already precarious infrastructure that supplies water to the city’s nearly two million residents. Many are regularly left without piped water for days or weeks.
Hygiene is among the first casualties of the situation, explains Hechavarria, a health professional who for weeks had to buy water from street vendors or collect it from broken pipes nearby.
Diarrhea has spread through the building where she lives, as residents struggle to keep even the small apartments clean.
“There is no one in this building who has not fallen ill,” Hechavarria said, adding that she herself was also recovering from a recent outbreak of fever and diarrhea.
Authorities in both the United States and Cuba began sounding the alarm.
Cuban health authorities warned in recent days about the spread of viruses, including a strain of viral hepatitis, as electricity and water supplies fail increasingly. And a U.S. health alert earlier this month warned travelers and residents about a “significant rise in diarrheal diseases across Cuba, linked to the ongoing degradation of the water and energy infrastructure.”
Since the United States imposed a fuel embargo in January, outages in Havana have now typically exceeded 24 hours, harming refrigeration and further straining the aging hydraulic infrastructure, of which nearly 90% depends on electric pumps, according to Cuba’s National Institute of Hydraulic Resources.
About 3.5 million people, or just under half the island’s population, are currently suffering from water scarcity, said the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
NO ESCAPE
The home of Hechavarria — a one-room, poorly ventilated apartment she shares with her 7-year-old son and husband — would horrify any doctor, despite her best efforts to maintain order and hygiene.
Thirty families live in equally tight spaces in the same small two-story building.
A recent power fluctuation damaged her refrigerator, leaving her with no way to preserve food. Instead, she uses it to store medicines, beans and rice.
Dishes are scattered across the kitchen counter and sink. She reuses the dirty dishwater to clean the floor or flush the toilet. She uses soap only when she has money to buy it.
Her husband, in turn, is responsible for pushing, at least once a week, a handmade cart equipped with two large drums to a pipe protruding from the wall of a local school.
If there are classes and electricity, the school switches on an electric pump that allows water to flow from the pipe into an alley.
On a recent weekday morning, neighbor Andrés Jimenez, a 76-year-old retired metalworker, arrived at the site just as the power went out. There was only a trickle of water left.
“If there is no power, they do not turn on the pump,” he said. Hygiene concerns would have to wait, he added.
The nurse Maria Elena Parlado, who lives nearby and works at a clinic in the neighborhood, said there is no escape from this new reality.
“Look around us,” she said, pointing to a pile of garbage by the roadside, next to a small sewage stream running along the sidewalk.
Even the clinic where she treats residents against outbreaks that spread quickly is without water, she said.
“Between one patient and another, I should be washing my hands, but sometimes I can’t.”
