Viruses run rampant across Havana as water, power fails

HAVANA, Sept 30 - Cuban housewife Yuamilka Hechavarria was asleep last Tuesday when water rushed into the cistern of the crumbling tenement where she lives in old Havana.

She jumped from bed, scrambling in the darkness of a blackout to top off a bucketful before the tap went dry. It was the first time her building had seen water in two months.

This scenario plays out in neighborhoods across Cuba's capital of Havana daily, where power outages exacerbated by a US oil blockade have crippled the already crumbling infrastructure that supplies water to the city's nearly two million people. Many regularly go without running water for days or weeks.

Hygiene is among the first casualties of the situation, explains Hechavarria, a healthcare worker, who for weeks had been forced to buy water from street vendors or scavenge it from nearby broken pipes.

Diarrhea has run rampant throughout her building, she says, as tenants struggle to keep even tiny apartments clean.

“There's no one in this building who hasn't gotten sick," said Hechavarria, adding that she too was recovering from a recent bout of fever and diarrhea.

Officials in both the United States and Cuba have begun to sound the alarm.

Health authorities in Cuba have warned in recent days of the spread of viruses, including a strain of viral hepatitis, as power and water increasingly fail. And a US health alert earlier this month warned travelers and residents of a "significant increase in diarrheal illness across Cuba, associated with the continuing degradation of the water and energy infrastructure."

Since the US imposed a fuel blockade in January, blackouts across Havana now regularly surpass 24 hours, hampering refrigeration and further crippling antiquated water infrastructure of which nearly 90% depends on electric-powered pumps, according to Cuba's National Institute of Hydraulic Resources.

Around 3.5 million people, or just under half the island's population, now suffer from water shortages, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has said.

NO ESCAPE FROM NEW REALITY

Hechavarria's home — a poorly ventilated, one-room hovel she shares with her 7-year-old son and husband — would make any doctor cringe, despite her best efforts to maintain order and hygiene.

Thirty families live in similarly cramped quarters in the same small two-story building.

A recent power surge damaged her refrigerator, leaving her without a way to conserve food. She uses it instead to store medicine, beans, and rice.

Plates litter her kitchen counter and sink. She reuses dirty dish water to clean the floor or flush the toilet. She uses soap only when she can afford it.

Her husband, meanwhile, is responsible for pushing a homemade handcart fitted with two large barrels at least once weekly to a pipe that juts from the wall of a local school.

If classes are in session and there is power, the school fires an electric pump that allows water to flow from the pipe into an alleyway.

On a recent weekday morning, neighbor Andres Jimenez, a 76-year-old retired metal worker, had arrived at the spot just as the power went out. Only a trickle of water remained.

"If there's no power, they don't run the pump," he said.

Concerns over hygiene would have to wait, he added.

Nurse Maria Elena Parlado, who lives nearby and works in a clinic in the neighborhood, said there is no escaping the new reality.

"Look around us," she said, pointing to a roadside trash heap beside a small stream of sewage running along the sidewalk.

Even the clinic where she treats local residents for fast-spreading viral outbreaks is without water, she said.

"Between one patient and another I should be washing my hands, but sometimes I can't." REUTERS