Amid Dirty Water & Trash New Market Built in Holguin, Cuba
The market will be occupied mainly by self-employed workers who had to leave the nearby Feria de los Chinos.
HAVANA TIMES – “A pigsty” is how the neighbors describe the new market for the sale of food and other products that is built a few meters from a polluted stream and surrounded by a huge garbage dump on Cuba street, between Carbo and Mendieta streets, in Holguin. In recent days, the walls of the kiosks have been rising to the same extent as popular discontent grows for the short distance between beans and sewer water, bread and waste of all kinds.
The city is filling up with this type of locale complains Heriberto, a resident in the neighborhood of the market that will house, basically, the self-employed workers who had to move from the nearby Feria de los Chinos. “They had tents there, and when the official press complained about the hygienic conditions, they were told that they had to dismantle them and have ended up here, where the filth is even worse.”
The Jigüe River, with its sewage from industrial and residential discharges, spreads its stench throughout the area, near the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin University Hospital. When the kiosks are finished, they will offer both imported and domestic food. Sacks of rice, sugar in bulk and boxes of frozen chicken quarters will be sold within a short distance from the bags of garbage, the piles of construction waste and that carried by the swollen stream.
“What’s worse is that this is authorized by the local authorities,” says a neighbor. The women thinks that economic precariousness has given rise to this kind of improvised sale with a poor infrastructure. “It eventually ends with the customer taking home a product that has been in contact with flies and germs in that environment,” she summarizes. To her surprise, some of her acquaintances do not see the contradiction in offering food in such a dirty place. “We are used to living surrounded by crap, that’s what happens.”
In a few weeks, the kiosks will be ready to sell pork loin, wheat flour and malangas. Customers will have to overcome the mud and grime to take that food home.
Translated by Regina Anavy for Translating Cuba.