The Cuban activist Anna Bensi (Anna Sofía Benítez Silvente) published a video on Facebook titled "Welcome to My Neighborhood" on Friday, in which she walks through the streets of Alamar, Havana, documenting the accumulation of waste.
In his clip, he launched a loaded irony with political significance: he had to ask for permission from the trash before posting the video, "because I don't want people to start commenting on the trash and then feel offended and open a criminal case against me."
The statement is not just a simple joke: Bensi has been facing a real criminal process since March under Article 393 of the Cuban Penal Code, which stipulates a prison sentence of two to five years for "acts against personal and family privacy."
The case began when she and her mother Caridad Silvente Laffita recorded a MININT agent delivering an irregular summons at their home. Both remain under house arrest since March 25, 2026.
In the two-minute and twelve-second video, the 21-year-old woman describes the piles of trash as "beautiful sculptures of waste that belong to the Cuban family" and warns that "there's trash every 10 steps" and that sometimes the accumulation is so great that "you have to take two steps back."
The political statement comes towards the end of the discourse: "We have already normalized here that those in power are garbage. But in the end, garbage is still garbage and needs to be eliminated."
Bensi also describes how the neighbors resort to burning waste in the street: "We set it on fire, a little flame here, a little flame there, to reduce the decay, but it's more of a smoke screen than anything else, toxic smoke."
Regarding the calls to the authorities to collect the garbage, the response is always the same: a lack of fuel for the trucks, an excuse that Bensi ironically critiques with surgical precision.
The waste crisis depicted is no exaggeration. According to reports from Infobae, only 44 out of the 106 garbage trucks in Havana were operational in 2026 due to a shortage of diesel, leaving up to 23,814 m³ of waste uncollected daily.
The neighborhood of Alamar itself was the scene of a pot-banging protest on July 8, when residents of Zones 9 and 11 burned trash in the street as a form of protest.
The video is produced weeks after the criminal case against Bensi, archived in April, was reopened on July 6 following a direct complaint from the very officer of MININT that she recorded.
Three days earlier, the activist was held for nearly 12 hours at the Alamar police station—four times the legal limit—where officers demanded she modify her videos.
Upon being released that night, she broke down in tears in front of family and activists who welcomed her with applause.
Regarding that moment, Bensi was clear: "My tears were from helplessness, from anger over so many hours of injustice. It was not weakness; on the contrary, all these things make my convictions stronger than ever."
A member of the youth collective “Out of the Box Cuba,” her case has garnered attention from Amnesty International, U.S. Congressman Mario Díaz-Balart, and the head of the U.S. mission in Havana, Mike Hammer.
In mid-July, Bensi urged Cubans not to watch from the sidelines and to overcome their fear: "We all have a voice. And if someone doesn’t want to speak out, they can be an arm or a leg."
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