For more than two weeks now, the pump that serves several apartment blocks and that extracts water from the cistern and pumps it into the tanks stopped working.
14ymedio, Mercedes García, Sancti Spíritus, 17 June 2025 — At Los Olivos 3, in Sancti Spíritus, the days begin and end with the same sound: the dull thud of buckets, the murmur of complaints, and the squeak of wheelbarrows. In buildings numbered 14 through 24, daily life has become an endurance race since the pump that draws water from the cistern and pumps it into the tanks stopped working more than two weeks ago.
The story is as old as the state’s lack of interest. “We went to the Aqueduct, to the Physical Planning Department, and then to the government,” says a resident who asked not to be identified, fearing retaliation. “At every office, every time, they gave us the same response: evasive answers, excuses, that they don’t have parts, that there’s no turbine.”
“At every office, they gave us the same response: evasive answers, excuses, that they don’t have parts, that there’s no turbine.”
The institutional apathy is evident in the proposal they finally received from the Party: that the residents meet and pay a private individual to repair the pump. “At the moment, they have no way to solve the problem,” they said. And so, with a terse phrase, they placed the weight of public responsibility on the weary shoulders of a community barely able to cope.
Multi-family buildings like those at Los Olivos were a testament to socialist urban planning: identical concrete blocks that promised dignity and community. But over time, like so many other
