During recent years, the number of Cubans experiencing homelessness has increased as the crisis on the island has worsened.
LIMA, Peru – For decades, government policy in Cuba has not addressed the conditions that lead hundreds of Cubans to beg, live poorly in doorways and ruins, or wander on the streets under precarious conditions and circumstances of extreme risk.
In recent years, the number of Cubans experiencing homelessness has increased as the island’s economic crisis has worsened, especially affecting elderly men and women.
A video of Cubanet in the streets of Havana collect some experiences and regrets of several of these people, relegated, even more than the rest of Cubans, to helplessness and daily survival.
“Strong, very strong,” was the response of an elderly man when referring to the current cold front that is lowering temperatures in the capital. With a sorrowful face, the man repeats the same words, “very strong,” perhaps at the thought of the freezing dawns of the city.
With pensions that are not even enough to eat, much less afford to rent a room, many older adults end up sleeping on the streets. Rummaging through garbage, resting on cardboard instead of mattresses, everyone faces the dangers of a life banned outdoors every day.
“Look, I was a pilot,” says another Cuban who huddles next to a pile of scattered bags and fabrics. “Cuban pilot Arnaldo Tamayo. That was my teacher. But as long as the communists continue to steal, this will never change.”
This weekend, the cold front will reduce temperatures in Havana’s early mornings to 12 and 14 degrees Celsius. Despite this prognosis, a 75-year-old Cuban from Campo Florido has no choice but to spend the night outside a closed establishment. He says that he has hardly eaten anything and that he suffers from diabetes.
“They have taken me to Las Guásimas and they have not resolved anything for me,” he denounces the treatment in a state center for the homeless.
In Cuba, although the official discourse is clothed in “sensitivity” and “humanism”, the authorities at times carry out more punitive actions than social, fundamentally oriented to hide poverty in areas visible to tourism and to reaffirm state control over marginal bodies.
As has been usual, the Cuban regime avoids referring to misery as a structural phenomenon and denies the failure of the economic model as the origin of exclusion.
