Guantanamo, a Cuban City Turned Into a Garbage Dump

Residents fear that the epidemiological crisis affecting other provinces will spread to their city.

By 14ymedio

HAVANA TIMES – “There’s garbage everywhere,” Guantánamo resident Héctor López Pérez summed up with dismay. The trash piling up everywhere has turned a city that was once considered “among the cleanest in Cuba” into a series of mountains of waste that mar its streets and threaten the health of its inhabitants.

With the epidemiological alert caused by the outbreak of dengue, chikungunya, and oropharynx in the province of Matanzas, residents of Guantánamo fear that the presence of these diseases will also gain ground in their homes. “The carts don’t come to collect the garbage,” Alain Lobaina Laserie warned 14ymedio, faced with the reality of street corners littered with waste.

Among the inhabitants of the city, which produces 1,200 cubic meters of solid waste per day, there is a widespread belief that the ‘Ordering Task‘ was the final blow to the private workers who worked with their carts collecting garbage. “They changed the payment system, with the currency exchange they implemented, and they all disappeared because their wages went down,” emphasizes Héctor López Pérez, adding: “Everything has gone up for the horses, from grass to horseshoes.”

Implemented in January 2021, the Ordering Task was presented as a necessary monetary and exchange rate reform that sought to eliminate the dual currency (CUC and CUP) and restructure income, prices, and subsidies. However, it ended up contributing to the devaluation of the peso, triggering inflation and fueling popular unrest.

The sector’s own executives acknowledge that “they have experienced various reorganizations,” and only this year did the municipal company convert from a budgeted unit to a business entity, a status that should give it greater flexibility in hiring staff, managing salaries, and other initiatives that can help revive the diminished workforce and purchase supplies.

Earlier this year, Rodolfo Sánchez Suárez, a hygiene specialist at the Municipal Communal Services Company, admitted to the local press that the entity only had “six tractors and three specialized garbage collection carts, and of these, only two of the former and one of the latter are operational; the remaining equipment is idle due to a lack of tires and spare parts.”

Since then, the situation has only worsened, and Guantanamo residents are trapped between the inefficiency of the Municipalities and the waste piling up everywhere. “There isn’t any, there isn’t any, and everything is just nonsense,” warns López Pérez, tired of hearing the same explanation that the country doesn’t have the foreign currency to import everything from gloves for employees to compaction trucks.

For Eriberto Téllez Reinosa, the problem lies in the fact that the authorities are completely overwhelmed by a problem that has been growing in severity in recent years. “The system can no longer support” waste management in the current situation, says the man, who sees no solution through state mechanisms that have consistently demonstrated their inability to efficiently handle waste collection.

Horse-drawn carts, run by private individuals, would not solve the whole problem either. “The specialized cart not only collects waste, but also compresses it, allowing it to maximize the amount it can transport in a single trip. It is capable of collecting up to 60 cubic meters of compressed garbage, while tractors use open carts, with a loading capacity of only 17 cubic meters per trip,” warned the newspaper Venceremos last January .

At the end of August, faced with the worrisome situation, official media outlets once again addressed the issue, appealing to the “collective conscience” of Guantanamo residents and urging them not to wait for community services to do their part. “Preventing an epidemic outbreak is easier than dealing with its consequences later,” they warned, but the time for focusing on precaution seems to be over. The viruses are already here, and the consequences are being felt now.

Translated by Translating Cuba.

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