“They are not bad, they are very bad,” says Walfrido bluntly, a former driver of a garbage collection truck for the Communal Services of Havana. The object of his annoyance is the blue garbage bins that are most currently on the streets of the city. “They are out of order and that worsens the situation that we already have with the fuel problems.”
Walfrido asked to leave his job, where he had worked for more than a decade, just a few weeks ago. “We had months in which we were paid very poorly with that of the Ordering Task and, in addition, the conditions are terrible: fewer and fewer trucks leave and when they leave you find a mound of garbage and containers with broken grips or burst sides” .
The employee explains 14ymedio that vandalism, especially the theft of container wheels to make carts to carry water or small carts to transport errands, are one of the causes of the deterioration of these containers. Also the theft of its plastic parts to melt and manufacture from strainers to toys. However, he considers that “the quality was bad from the beginning, the part of the grip that the truck has to engage looked like it was not going to last long”.
The corner of Factor and Conill, in Nuevo Vedado, seems to illustrate what Walfrido says. Garbage has been accumulating for days without the collection truck picking it up and, in addition, the blue containers in the area are cracked, some are lame on a wheel, others are missing their lids. Facing the mountain of waste stands a five-story multi-family building.
“We cannot open the window of the room because it opens directly onto the garbage cans and flies and odors sneak in all the time”
“We can’t open the window of the room because it opens directly onto the garbage cans and flies and bad smells sneak in all the time,” says Niurka, a neighbor of the building and mother of two small children. “We have called Communal several times but they tell me that there are problems with fuel and that the trucks are leaving less.”
El Vedado, an area where the problem of garbage collection has not traditionally been as serious as in the municipalities of Centro Habana, Cerro or Diez de Octubre, for months the scenes of waste piling up on street corners have fueled the discomfort of the residents in that neighborhood. “You are walking and the smell that reaches you everywhere is rotten,” a retired woman who was queuing at an Etecsa office on 19th Street near B complained on Tuesday.
Garbage containers in Havana, despite various government attempts to divide them according to the type of waste, currently store any waste, be it organic, plastic, paper or metal. The separation of these materials continues to be a chimera in a city that produces nearly 23,000 cubic meters of solid waste every day and where the state-owned Comunales can barely manage part of it.
The collectors of raw materials such as aluminum, paper and glass bottles help somewhat, but the delays in payment and the irregular opening hours of the official points of purchase of these raw materials have been spreading the reluctance among these private workers or people who survive in the streets with those who earn for this work.
Then everything falls on the blue containers: housing construction waste, old vehicle parts, spoiled food scraps and highly polluting products for the environment such as batteries or hospital waste, including expired drugs. In its fragile structure “there is no bed for so many people,” concludes Walfrido: “It’s like wanting to put Havana in Guanabacoa.”
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