Chronicles of Havana: The chemist adds collapsed bodies to the landscape of Havana

Havana/In San Lázaro you have to look up and down at the same time. Up, to avoid with your eyes gutted balconies, exposed beams and pieces of buildings that seem to be calculating when to let themselves fall. Down, so as not to trip over the gaps in the sidewalk and discover, from time to time, someone who has also collapsed.

Next to a tree and against the blue wall of a house, a young man remains sitting on the ground. He is strong, he is wearing a black t-shirt and shorts, but his body is defeated, his head is bent on his chest and he has a posture that we Havanans have learned to identify. In the absence of a diagnosis, those who pass through the area already have a street word for situations like this: “enchemized.”

Life continues a few meters away. Pedestrians, almendrones and tricycles pass by. Nobody seems too surprised. Perhaps this is where the most disturbing thing lies: these images are no longer exceptional in some areas of Havana.

The “chemical”, as several synthetic cannabinoids are popularly known, has gone in a few years from being an issue that the authorities spoke little about to becoming a problem recognized even by official television. In May 2025the Ministry of the Interior reported 342 people accused of drug trafficking and consumption in Havana and 810 files opened by the Prosecutor’s Office related to these crimes. The Police had then identified 74 “complex environments” in the capital and pointed out eight especially problematic areas.

The list included neighborhoods of Playa, Marianao, La Lisa, Boyeros, Old Havana, San Miguel del Padrón and Cerro. Centro Habana did not even need an introduction: there, the official spokesman Humberto López himself admitted then, “drugs exist and everyone knows it and it has existed for years.” The authorities also recognized the concern about consumption among minors.

Since then, geography appears to have become less precise because the problem appears in broad daylight and on busy avenues. Just a few weeks ago, in Reina and Galiano, two young people collapsed under the effects of the chemical. While they were unable to react, a man took the opportunity to steal someone’s backpack of them and disappeared among the passers-by. The episode occurred one day after an anti-drug operation on that same street.

Now the scene is repeated, with other coordinates: San Lázaro. Few avenues could offer a more coherent decoration to this young man paralyzed by drugs, because the entire street seems like an open scar that runs through the city from Old Havana to El Vedado. On both sides, buildings survive with amputated balconies, bare walls, boarded-up windows and props that long ago stopped aspiring to elegance to simply concentrate on not collapsing.

On a corner, an old yellow car passes in front of a facade chewed up by collapses. On the wall, of the street name, also mutilated, barely a word survives: “Persevere.” A little further on, the young man will continue, for hours, collapsed against a wall.