They record a Cuban teenager in a street situation in Havana

The opponent Silverio Portal has recorded a teenager living on the street in Havana. In a video shared on his Facebook wall, the former political prisoner, who served four years in prison for demonstrating peacefully, shows "the need of the system", "so that the whole world can see the need of the Cuban" and how far they have gone to stop things in the country, "the youth lost in the plain."

In the audiovisual you can see a teenager sleeping in broad daylight on top of some cardboard, in a central area, surrounded by buildings and a park. "This is degrading," says Silverio Portal, while recording the images.

In his opinion, videos like this show that Cuba "was lost in nothingness" and that is why, waving a United States flag, he asks for "freedom, freedom and freedom."

This image of a teenager living on the street in Havana adds to the increasingly common scene of people, especially older people, looking for food and other resources in garbage tanks.

At the beginning of this week the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH) warned about the increase in begging in the country, highlighting that it is increasingly common to find adults in vulnerable situations.

“Seeing people searching garbage dumps and landfills is part of the common panorama on the island, where 88% of the population lives well below the poverty line,” the organization denounced on the social network X.

To demonstrate this, they shared a video that brings together images of Cubans rummaging through the garbage in Camagüey and Havana. These images are in line with a study that ensures that Cuba is the poorest country in Latin America.

The big losers of the Ordering Task, banking and the exchange rate have been the Cubans who have no other means of income other than the State. Although the Communist Party has recognized that this Ordering Task and this banking system have been a failure, it has not taken measures to correct inflation, which is currently out of control due to the fall in remittances, tourism and the wrong policies that have sown distrust among those who have foreign currency and prefer to keep it under the mattress than in a state bank. At the moment, the efforts of the authorities to correct the high rates of poverty, scarcity and precariousness that the Island has suffered for years, but which have increased since the pandemic, are not noticeable.

Recently the regime admitted that the number of beggars on the island has tripled. According to the Ministry of Labor and Social Security (MTSS), 3,690 homeless people have been registered in Cuba between 2014 and 2023, according to a report from the official newspaper Trabajadores.

In it Population and Housing Census of the year 2012, The last one that was done in Cuba, more than 1,100 people were counted living on the streets. In 2015, that figure increased to 1,261, based on data provided by the official body of the CTC union.

The extreme situation that the country is experiencing, added to the increase in repression, is behind the mass exodus that Cuba has suffered in the last two years. Nearly half a million people from the island have arrived in the United States alone, not counting all those who die during the migratory adventure which, in most cases, includes crossing the feared Darien jungle.