Guantánamo, a city converted into a garbage dump

Guantanamo/“Everywhere there is garbage,” Héctor López Pérez from Guantanamo summarizes with discomfort. The waste that accumulates everywhere has turned a city that was “among the cleanest in Cuba” into a sequence of mountains of waste that disfigure its streets and threaten the health of its inhabitants.

With the epidemiological alert that has caused the outbreak of dengue, chikungunya and oropouche in the province of Matanzas, residents in Guantánamo fear that the presence of these diseases will also gain strength in their homes. “The carts do not come to collect the garbage,” warns, for his part, Alain Lobaina Laserie to 14ymedio faced with the reality of corners full of waste.

Among the inhabitants of the city, which produces 1,200 cubic meters of solid waste per day, the opinion is widespread that the Ordering Task was the final blow to the private companies who worked, with their carts, in collecting garbage. “They changed the payment system, with the currency exchange they have made and all of them have disappeared because their salaries went down,” underlines Héctor López Pérez and adds: “Everything has gone up, the grass for the horse, the horseshoes.”

Among the inhabitants of the city, the opinion is widespread that the Planning Task was the final blow to the private sector that worked

Implemented as of January 2021, the Ordering Task was presented as a necessary monetary and exchange reform that sought to eliminate double currency (CUC and CUP), 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 managers acknowledge that “they have experienced various reorganizations” and only this year the municipal company converted from a budgeted unit to a business entity, a category that should give it greater flexibility for hiring personnel, managing salaries and other initiatives that can help revive the diminished workforce and the purchase of inputs.

At the beginning of this year, Rodolfo Sánchez Suárez, hygiene specialist at the Municipal Community Services Company, acknowledged before the local press that the entity only had “six tractors and three specialized carts for garbage collection and, of them, only two of the first and one of the second are in operation; the other equipment is inert due to lack of tires and spare parts.”

Since then, the situation has only gotten worse and Guantanamo residents are trapped between the inefficiency of Comunales and the waste that piles up everywhere. “There is no, there is no and everything is no,” warns López Pérez, tired of hearing the same explanation that the country does not have foreign currency to import everything from gloves for employees to compactor trucks.

For Eriberto Téllez Reinosa, the problem lies in the fact that the authorities are absolutely overwhelmed by a problem that has been growing in severity in recent years. “The system no longer supports” waste management in the current situation, says the man who does not see a solution through state mechanisms that have systematically demonstrated their inability to deal efficiently with waste collection.

Horse carts, managed by private parties, would not be able to solve the entire problem either. “The specialized cart not only collects waste, but also compresses it, maximizing the amount it can transport in a single trip. It is capable of collecting up to 60 cubic meters of compressed garbage, while the tractors use open carts, with a loading capacity of only 17 cubic meters on each trip,” he warned. last January the newspaper we will win.

At the end of August, faced with the worrying panorama, the official media returned to the issue, appealing to the “collective consciousness” of the Guantanamo residents and called not to wait for the communal 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 experienced now.