A video shared on social media this Saturday shows a woman and a man rummaging through the overflow of a dumpster on a Havana street surrounded by dilapidated buildings and piled-up garbage.
"It's 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 while sharing the images on her Facebook profile.
The scenario is not unfamiliar with the waste collection crisis facing the capital. At the beginning of the year, only 44 out of the 106 collection 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 only an issue of urban appearance. The Global Dengue Observatory (GDO) at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine reports 7,133 cases of dengue in Cuba so far this year, a figure 7.4 times higher than the expected rate for this time of year.
Recently, the Ministry of Public Health (Minsap) acknowledged an increase in dengue, diarrhea, and other diseases in the country.
Images of people searching through waste are becoming increasingly common. In April, a man was caught eating from a dumpster in Santiago de Cuba, while another video recorded in Centro Habana showed elderly people, children, and adults picking up onions from a landfill.
In May, the Havana resident Basilio Plasencia shared that he resorted to rummaging through dumpsters to find food and items. According to his statement, he has even eaten bread found among the waste and has received fines of up to 10,000 pesos for searching through the trash.
The necessity has also turned waste into a source of income for some people. In June, a report documented in Havana a street vendor who sold items rescued from the trash and acknowledged that practically everything he offered came from waste.
The deterioration of living conditions is also reflected in the IX Study by the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, published in August based on 1,318 interviews conducted across 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 lack of money or food.
In this context, a scene of people rummaging through the trash stops being an isolated image of urban decay and becomes further evidence of a social crisis in which waste can represent a source of food, reusable items, or income for some families.
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