The K5 bar and Casaquinta restaurant initiative is repeated for the third consecutive year.
MIAMI, United States. – Cuban entrepreneur Hugo Puig González announced on Facebook that on December 31, a free meal will once again be held on the terrace of the K5 bar, in Guanabo (Eastern Havana), aimed at homeless people and “most needy” neighbors.
According to its publication, the activity will begin at 3:00 in the afternoon and is organized next to the Casaquinta restaurant “for the third consecutive year.”
In the message, Puig González asked the community to help focus the invitation on those who really need it and warned that the food “is NOT for everyone who wants to eat for free.” In the same publication, he argued that if a person who is not in a vulnerable situation occupies a place that day, “a person who is really in need (…) may not be able to have that amount of happiness.”
The organizer also included data to support donations to a community group he identified as “WITH LOVE ALL TOGETHER,” which, he wrote, works “year-round” with homeless people, the sick, and other disadvantaged people. In his post he shared card numbers to donate in CUP and MLC, as well as a contact telephone number.
The K5 initiative dates back to December 2023, when various media reported that the bar offered free food to 180 people in the neighborhood, including “very low-income old people and children.” Martí News He then reported that the dinner was offered in Guanabo and that the owner explained that he sought to reproduce the complete experience of a New Year’s Eve meal, “sitting at a table, and eating a good meal on a plate, with music and in company.”
After that first edition, Puig González himself declared to the aforementioned media that the impact surprised him and presented the gesture as part of a sustained commitment to the community.
One year later, on December 31, 2024, the entrepreneur repeated the initiative.
Puig González’s announcement once again highlights an increasingly visible reality in Cuba: the increase in people in conditions of extreme vulnerability, including the homeless population, which in recent years has appeared more frequently in community stories and independent press releases.
For this December 31, the entrepreneur asked for “understanding” and neighborhood collaboration so that the call reaches those who really need it, with the objective – according to his own text – of “making these people feel that they do matter to us, that they do deserve a happy December 31.”
People living on the streets, at the center of the controversy in 2025
People in street situations – wanderers, the authorities of the Cuban regime call them – were in the center of attention in 2025 after the statements, in the middle of the year, by the then Minister of Labor and Social Security Marta Elena Feitó Cabrera, who He denied that beggars existed in Cuba and described homeless people as “disguised” who have opted for “an easy way of life.”
In addition to denying begging on the Island, the former official dismissed the idea that people who dig through the trash do so out of necessity: “That’s not true either, those are patterns that they try to impose on us.” According to her, these people “are recovering raw materials” as part of an “illegal economic activity” that evades taxes.
Such statements unleashed an avalanche of criticism, both from citizens and from voices linked to the ruling party. The communicator Rosy Amaro Pérez asked walk along the Rampa and Old Havana “without a car, or air conditioning,” and the economist Pedro Monreal wrote on networks that there seemed to be “people disguised as ‘ministers’.”
For his part, Miguel Díaz-Canel admitted the existence of “certain expressions of vulnerability, of people walking on the streets or wandering behavior,” thus recognizing what his minister had flatly denied. “If one is recognizing that this problem exists here, you cannot denigrate the figures that are involved (…) because then what it expresses is a lack of knowledge of the reality that the country is experiencing,” he said.
