A Cuban identified on TikTok as Yala Right personally funded a community cleanup day in his neighborhood—hiring five workers, renting a tractor with a driver and cart, and purchasing six pairs of gloves—only to witness the neighbors themselves throwing trash on the ground in front of his workers while celebrating and drinking.
The video published this Friday on TikTok documents a day of 10 hours —from 10 AM to 8 PM— during which the team removed four carts filled with diapers, cans, bottles, and cardboard that had accumulated over months on a street that also leads to the entrance of a church.
"Without lying to you, there is garbage piled up from months. We were throwing away diapers, cans, bottles, cardboard, even things you can't imagine," recounted the Cuban in the video.
At the end of the day, there was still litter in the area. However, what struck the protagonist the most was not the unfinished work, but the attitude of those who lived on that same street.
"While we were sweating profusely, the very same people from the town were celebrating, drinking, and partying, tossing beer cans on the ground and throwing trash in our faces, with no respect whatsoever," he denounced.
In response to that reaction, Yala Right announced that it will not immediately proceed with its plan to clean all the trash cans in the neighborhood.
"I will wait three or four days to see how clean they keep that street, and if it convinces me, I will change my behavior and commit to cleaning all the trash bins," he warned.
The episode is not an isolated case. Cuba is undergoing one of its worst waste collection crises, exacerbated by the energy collapse and fuel shortages. Since February 2026, only 44 of the 106 collection trucks in Havana have been operational, leaving up to 23,814 cubic meters of waste uncollected daily.
That state paralysis has pushed citizens from different neighborhoods to take it upon themselves to handle what the regime cannot or will not resolve. In Centro Habana, neighbors are paying out of their own pockets for two men to watch a corner and prevent it from becoming an improvised dump. In Casino Deportivo, residents organized their own collection in the absence of garbage trucks. In Nuevitas and Guantánamo, animal-drawn carts have returned to the streets to compensate for the state's shortcomings.
What the Yala Right video adds to this picture is a dimension of social demoralization: individual effort collides not only with institutional collapse but also with the indifference from the very community that benefits from it.
"My intention is to take all the trash with me, even if it takes more days, but I have started to question it a bit because I feel that people are not cooperating," the Cuban admitted, encapsulating in a single sentence the frustration of those trying to do what the State stopped doing long ago.
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