APP GRATIS

Lack of personnel and spare parts cause accumulation of tons of garbage in Havana

Between 4,000 and 5,000 cubic meters of garbage are left uncollected every day in the capital of Cuba.


Tons of garbage in the streets of Havana They are waiting to be collected due to a lack of personnel and spare parts for the communal services fleet.

This was recognized by capital authorities in a recent reportage from Cuban Television, in which they admitted that “the deterioration of equipment to collect garbage is the main Achilles heel of companies.”

More than 200 teams are paralyzed for different reasons, including 63 collection trucks and 174 dumping trucks, he indicated Onelio of Jesus Ojeda, provincial director of Community Services of Havana.

The most deficient spare parts at the moment are fundamentally tires and batteries, although other parts and aggregate pieces are also deficient, which limits the daily work of the teams.

For her part, the director of the provincial Communal Hygiene company, Odalis Acosta, referred to the lack of spare parts, either from the equipment received as a donation (currently the only ones in operation), or the old ones, from countries like Russia. “We don't have the parts we need for the Zil trucks, nor for the Kamaz trucks,” he said.

To this situation with the fleet of vehicles and means for garbage collection, we should add the problem of lack of labor force. According to De Jesús Ojeda, the “instability of the workforce” has forced the capital's Community Services to have to work “with a significant group of inmates and sanctioned people.”

“That constitutes an important force in us, based on the instability of the workforce and the completion of the workforce, which is at 68%,” said the manager.

In that sense, Acosta said that "today the average salary of the workers of this company is about 3,500 pesos on average."

“So, this hits us hard because, well, workers have to have money. They have to have money, right? Get paid for the work they do,” emphasized the director of the provincial Communal Hygiene company.

According to the report on official television, on average, in Havana only 68% of the waste generated by the population and economic actors is collected daily. The rest remains on the road: between 4,000 and 5,000 cubic meters of garbage are left uncollected every day in the city, mainly in the municipalities on the outskirts of the capital.

This is how he described it Javier Hernandez, a resident of the capital: “There is a lot of dirt here and it harms all of us neighbors. For example, I have two children, to the side of my house there are children, to the side too, to the back there are children... and there are many diseases”.

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