Cuba: No Street Sweeper Can Handle So Much Trash
Without gloves and without supplies to carry out his task, he is faced with an inhumane task: saving what is the dirtiest city in Cuba.
By Juan Diego Rodríguez (14ymedio)
HAVANA TIMES – The man was slumped on the sidewalk, in the shadow of a crumbling wall. He could have been a beggar—it’s not unusual for hunger or alcohol to bring many to the ground—but he’s a street sweeper. Beside him are the tools of his trade: two broken buckets and a broom, attached to a wheelbarrow that can’t hold another thing.
The fact that the street is littered with garbage suggests that what brought him down there wasn’t rum or el químico —the dangerous and now common Cuban street drug, an anesthetic against reality—but rather the city’s excess of trash piles. One ox can’t plow, goes the Creole saying; one street sweeper isn’t enough to combat the capital’s filth.
The complaints and protests, the calls to order, and the complaints to Municipal Services have been of no avail. The street sweeper, without gloves to operate, without supplies to carry out his task, is faced with an inhumane task: saving what is the dirtiest city in Cuba.
So the man, dressed and shod in rags, seeks respite in the shade from the scorching Creole sun and the no less torturous stretch of city he must overcome. Cars with state-issued license plates pass by him with their usual indifference. On the corner, there’s a food stand, also not free from dirt.
So the man, dressed and shod in rags, seeks respite in the shade from the scorching Creole sun and the no less torturous stretch of city he must overcome. Cars with state-issued license plates pass by him with their usual indifference. On the corner, there’s a food stand, also not free from dirt.
In a little while, he’ll be walking again, barely recovered, to continue “in the little fight,” a diminutive that doesn’t soften the mountains he’ll literally encounter in his path. In Key West, Central Havana, a short distance from the “fallen man,” a grotesque landfill continues to challenge passersby and hinder traffic.
It is the Hospital Street dumpster, ironic not only because of the name of the street on which it’s located, but also because of its resistance to any sort of cleanup. What person, armed only with a broom and two buckets, could have dealt with such a prodigious accumulation of paper, shells, bags, excrement, and liquids?
The only ones who dare to launch expeditions to such dumps are the divers, dressed and armed with the same precariousness as the street sweepers, who try to make a virtue out of necessity, or if not a virtue, at least food and raw materials. In exchange for a few kilos, the State will pay the divers—usually elderly or needy—for any useful “treasures” they find. This is the closest it has come to taking any real measure in favor of street hygiene.
Even the official press knows that the situation is completely out of control. Reporters financed by the Communist Party have been unable to hide their disgust at the garbage dumps multiplying in almost every corner of the country.
Some—like the author of an article published this Tuesday on the Matanzas radio station’s website—are crying out for a solution. However, they continue to attribute the rot to a source as remote as Washington. “The blockade exists and affects every sphere of Cuban society, and that’s something we have to live with, at least for the moment,” the journalist asserted.
With a photo of a sato dog also collapsed—in exactly the same position as the Havana street sweeper—on a garbage dump in Matanzas, the article lists the dirtiest municipalities: Matanzas, Cárdenas, Colón, Perico, Jagüey Grande, and Jovellanos.
It refers to a provincial government meeting where the conclusion was that, precisely in those areas, the number of MSMEs approved by the State has been directly proportional to the growth of dump sites. This isn’t the first time the “new enemy” of hygiene has been singled out, but without stating what the authorities will do with the existing garbage.
Where do the “almost 1,000 liters of fuel distributed daily in Matanzas”—or in the rest of the provinces—end up, according to Radio 26 ? The station doesn’t explain.
Nor does Trabajadores —another of the official newspapers that have commented on the garbage crisis that month—explain what Havana will do to contain a reality that has disfigured, in its own words, a “clean city” in a matter of years.
“Raising social awareness” is the only solution the regime offers. But what conscience—social, personal, or of any kind—can remain for a man who, face to face with the landfill, collapses in the face of a seemingly impossible mission.
Translated by Translating Cuba.