A video circulated on social media this Saturday shows a woman and a man rummaging through the trash of an overflowing dumpster on a Havana street surrounded by dilapidated buildings and piled-up garbage.
"It is sad to see this in Cuba with so many illnesses and people searching through the trash; it breaks the soul," wrote the user Liena López Delgado as she shared the images on her Facebook profile.
The situation is not unfamiliar with the waste collection crisis facing the capital. At the beginning of the year, only 44 of the 106 garbage trucks in Havana were operational, barely 41% of the fleet, while the city generates between 24,000 and 30,000 cubic meters of solid waste daily, most of which remains uncollected.
The accumulation of garbage is not just an issue of urban image. The Global Dengue Observatory (GDO) at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine records 7,133 cases of dengue in Cuba so far this year, a figure 7.4 times higher than the expected level for this time of year.
Similarly, the Ministry of Public Health (Minsap) recently acknowledged an increase in dengue, diarrhea, and other diseases in the country.
Images of people searching through waste are becoming increasingly frequent. In April, a man was caught eating from the trash in Santiago de Cuba, while another video recorded in Centro Habana showed elderly people, children, and adults picking up onions from a dump.
In May, the Havana resident Basilio Plasencia recounted that he turned to dumpsters to obtain food and items. He stated that he has even eaten bread found among the trash and has received fines of up to 10,000 pesos for rummaging through the garbage.
The need has also turned waste into a source of income for some individuals. In June, a report by Telemundo 51 documented in Havana a street vendor who sold items salvaged from the trash and acknowledged that nearly everything he offered came from waste.
The deterioration of living conditions is also reflected in the IX Study of the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, published in August based on 1,318 interviews conducted in the 15 provinces.
The report concluded that 94% of respondents live in extreme poverty and that eight out of ten people have had to skip a meal due to a lack of money or food.
In that context, an apparently ordinary scene of people rummaging through the trash ceases to be an isolated postcard of urban decay and transforms into further evidence of a social crisis where waste can represent a source of food, reusable items, or income for some families.
Filed under: