The Water Nobody Collects

July 6, 2026

HAVANA TIMES — There are places where water is a luxury. Some families spend entire days waiting for it to come through a pipe. Others wake up before dawn to fill buckets before it disappears again. Some rely on a water truck or on a neighbor who still has a little left in a cistern. And then there is this corner of Miramar, where water is never in short supply, instead, it simply goes to waste.

The first time I saw it, I assumed it was a recent break. One of those leaks that appears from one day to the next. But the days passed, and the water kept flowing. Not forcefully, not like a fountain that demands attention. It trickles along patiently, as if it knows no one will stop it. It forms a small stream beside the curb. Cars drive past it as though they no longer notice it, neighbors step around it, and pedestrians learn where to place their feet to avoid getting wet.

Little by little, the leak stops being news and becomes part of the landscape, and perhaps that is where the real problem begins. Because when a city grows accustomed to waste, it also stops being surprised by it.

I watch the water spread across the asphalt, and I cannot help thinking about those who, just a few miles from here, turn on a faucet and nothing comes out. I think of the buckets, the storage tanks, the nights spent waiting for the pumps to start, the families who measure every liter as though they were managing a treasure.

And here, meanwhile, the water flows freely, with nowhere to go, with no one collecting it. No one seems to be in any hurry to stop it. The irony is hard to ignore. In a country where water has become a daily concern for thousands of people, there are also places where it is lost in plain sight. Not hidden, not underground, but out in the open, in broad daylight. As if the problem were not important enough. As if that thin stream of water did not represent hundreds of buckets that someone, in another neighborhood, would give anything to fill.

Sometimes I think water leaks are a lot like the cracks in a city. They do not appear all at once. They begin as something small, and then we grow used to seeing them. And one day they no longer seem extraordinary. This photograph does not merely show a wet street; it reveals something far more difficult to repair: the habit of living alongside what should never have become normal.