Cuba Is Now Drowning in a Sea of Burning Trash and Disease While the U.S. Looks On
What does it look like as a country falls apart, cut off from resources, assistance and humanitarian aid? It’s dark, for one–as the nation of Cuba rations what little fuel and renewable energy it can produce, regular blackouts continue to engulf the island, cutting off the access of regular people to healthcare, food production and lifesaving surgery among other things. But another marker of collapse isn’t so much visual, but olfactory: Chaos stinks, literally. Without fuel, trash collection services become sporadic or suspended altogether. Without garbage removal, trash piles up in homes, or on the street. Soon, neighborhoods are swamped in rotting organic refuse, or choked by the fumes of burning garbage as desperate citizens attempt to mound the trash and incinerate it in close proximity to homes. Does it really need to be stated that this constitutes a health crisis on multiple fronts? And per usual, the United States continues to sit back and allow the chaos and death to unfold, denying the people of Cuba material assistance in their suffering. Actually, it’s worse than that: The U.S. just chose this moment to slap new, additional sanctions on Cuba in the name of President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s quest to force regime change in yet another country, before they’ve even finished with their most recent war in Iran.
The Guardian reports that Cuban authorities have responded to the latest trash crisis by designating 122 “temporary waste collection points” in Havana, which become massive mounds of rotting garbage with no one to pick them up and cart them away. Two dozen of the points are intended for use in what is referred to as “controlled incineration,” but widespread trash burning is reportedly happening elsewhere at the same time. Worse, those “unofficial” fires typically burn less efficiently, releasing more toxic compounds into neighboring civilian homes.
“This releases substances from the waste and creates new ones as molecules break down and re-form in the flames … [which] can persist in the environment for years and in the human body for perhaps a decade or more,” said a warning statement from the Cuban Neuroscience Center.
Many people in Cuba are sifting through garbage for food, thanks to being in the third month of Trump’s oil blockade. Cuba is in ruins.There is so much suffering there. And it’s all because of Trump.
— Raider (@iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social) Apr 16, 2026 at 10:02 PM
Residents have no choice but to continue about their daily business as if the trash isn’t piling up all around them. In a clothing market in central Havana, a woman named Yani Cabrera watched as her shop filled with smoke from the garbage fires, and observed the obvious to The Guardian: “We have to try to survive and hang in there because things aren’t getting any better. What can we do?”
Nor is smoke and chemical inhalation the only serious health problem created by so much trash. Its other results include “an epidemic of flies, rats, waste and foul odors,” as well as the potential resurgence of another public health crisis that nearly brought the country to its knees this past winter: Mosquito-borne illnesses. Following the powerful landfall of Hurricane Melissa in the fall, the water-logged country was plagued by a much-increased spawning of mosquitos, with many of the insects carrying the viral disease chikungunya, which can cause sudden high fever and intense, debilitating joint pain that can leave sufferers unable to stand or walk. Potentially millions of Cubans are suspected to have been infected by chikungunya in what was effectively an epidemic of the disease this winter. Now, the mosquitos are likely multiplying once again in pools of garbage water amid the city streets, while fumigation companies are unable to operate due to fuel shortages and equipment costs. Cuba’s typical rainy season is also due to begin this month, which will almost certainly coincide with another mosquito boom … and the once vaunted Cuban health system is largely powerless, given that the electrical grid can barely keep hospitals and clinics able to offer the most basic of services. All told, the stage is set for more rounds of mass death.
33 people in Cuba have died in chikungunya & dengue outbreaks, most of the deaths involve children. The mosquito-borne infectious viruses have affected at least one-third of the Cuban population, Cuban health experts say ????
— Delthia Ricks (@dricks.bsky.social) Dec 2, 2025 at 6:18 PM
So yes, obviously this was the time to apply additional sanctions! Who cares that a carton of eggs in Cuba now costs the same as a retiree’s entire monthly pension? The people aren’t yet hurting badly enough to be motivated!
The United States attitude of hyper-cruelty toward the Cuban people has been driven by Trump, whose interest primarily seems to be of an egomaniacal nature, wanting to achieve the infamy of being the one to finally bring down the Cuban regime, but also notably by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has been lusting after Cuban regime change for his entire life. As Rubio put it this week, casually disregarding the deaths of countless civilians: “Their economic model doesn’t work, and the people in charge can’t fix it,” calling those same people “incompetent communists.” Hours earlier, he appeared in a photo with Gen. Francis Donovan, head of U.S. Southern Command (and our illegal boat strikes program that continues to murder random people without evidence), posed in front of a map of Cuba. If the U.S. invades, would they at least lend a hand in disposing of all the trash?
Trump has of course made all manners of threat about how the U.S. will soon “take over” Cuba or allow the country to consume itself, at one point seemingly threatening to put Rubio personally in charge. In reality, he’s likely been hoping for a popular uprising despite the lack of any organized resistance to the longtime Cuban regime, and the small chance of that actually being successful. Trump has settled instead for simply choking and starving the country to death, not allowing any Cuban allies to deliver shipments of desperately needed oil for the faltering Cuban electrical grid, despite the protestations of human rights advocates and Democratic members of Congress such as Rep. Pramila Jayapal. One gets the sense that when making some of his threats and pronouncements, Trump probably thought that the U.S. would already have made a definitive move on Cuba at this point, only to watch as his Iran quagmire simply refuses to end, more than $25 billion burned U.S. taxpayer dollars into that Middle East entanglement. Not even Trump’s famously short attention span has allowed him to actually switch over yet to focusing on Cuba.
NEWS: Marco Rubio met with a U.S. Southern Command general earlier today and took a photo in front of a map of Cuba. Trump has frequently said he plans to invade Cuba next after the Iran war.
— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) May 5, 2026 at 3:50 PM
Not even the Cubans living in America will be spared the wrath of Trump and Rubio. Deportations of Florida Cubans are now at record highs in the second Trump administration, despite the fact that they were one of the crucial voting blocs in the Sunshine State that helped him secure both of his terms. Trump has already deported more Florida Cubans to Cuba than any other recent President, and still others are being randomly sent en masse to Mexico, a place where they don’t have any kind of lineage or family history. Some Florida Cubans have even had the dubious honor of first being imprisoned in the torture-fueled Everglades ICE detention camp known as Alligator Alcatraz, and then being told upon release to self-deport back to Cuba … the same country that Trump is calling a failed state, where mountains of garbage choke the streets. Quite a thank you for the electoral support of those Florida Cubans, is it not?
The situation in Cuba itself remains an exceedingly dire humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in slow motion, with an appalling lack of coverage in the U.S. mass media, given the unsurprising focus on the Iran War in particular. Perhaps if the American right was forced to smell in their own homes what the streets of Havana are like right now, they might find an iota of compassion for the situation and demand that the United States stop actively abetting a disaster in progress.