Does sewage affect the railway line? So, make a ditch

Havana/On Conill Street, in Nuevo Vedado, there is a smell that prevents you from seeing the landscape. A thick stench that invades the sidewalk where every morning the students of the José Miguel Pérez high school pass, almost in droves. For months now, the pestilence has emerged like a warning, a daily reminder that sewage waters do not understand schedules or routines. The dark stream emerges from a collapsed culvert and winds down the street.

The water comes out through the gaps and edges of the metal lid, dragging bags and garbage in its wake. On its journey, the viscous liquid has been conquering ground until it runs into the railway rails that reach the 19 de Noviembre station, on Tulipán Street: on part of the line, the mixture of mud, grease and excrement has formed a quagmire that threatens both the nose and the metal.

The image of the place this Saturday speaks for itself: a group of workers, with their boots ankle-deep in fresh mud, use their shovels to remove dirt that smells like a public bathroom. Around them, puddles reflect a blue sky that seems incompatible with the disaster under the employees’ feet.

A brigade embarks on what seems an impossible mission: protect the railway line. They don’t have pumps, they don’t have new pipes or tools to remake the sewage network. They only have shovels, rubber boots and patience. Their “solution”—if it can be called that—is to open a trench under the rails to divert water and prevent the structure from moving as it loses its solidity at the base. A kind of makeshift channel that will hopefully keep the humidity at bay for a few days… or a few hours.

As they dig, the smell grows stronger under the midday sun. And the irony too: in a city facing a resurgence of respiratory and digestive viruses, with overcrowded hospitals and pharmacies without basic medications, this constant flow of sewage seems a direct provocation.

The neighbors are no longer surprised. They learned a long time ago to live with “temporary solutions”, those patches that fill speeches and press reports but never get to the heart of the problem. The routine is patch, divert, cap, refill, reopen, recap. As if the entire city were subjected to an infinite cycle of cosmetic repairs that do not cure, but rather chronicle. A Havana where life happens between sewage spills and the slow passage of a train that, with luck, will manage to move forward without sinking into the quagmire.