SAN LUIS POTOSÍ, Mexico.- The Latin American Solidarity School, located in The Guásimasin the Havana municipality of Arroyo Naranjo, served decades ago as a center for children with behavioral problems, but has become a shelter with conditions that do not resemble a concentration camp.
Once a place designed to provide shelter for homeless families, the Las Guásimas building is home to families with children, the elderly and homeless people who come to the building to spend the night and are then expelled from the place, as was confirmed by CubaNet.
Luis Antonio Cedeño, known as Tony among his friends, described the place as “a homeless shelter” but almost “a concentration camp.”
There are many reasons that lead Tony to name the hostel In this way, it is, ultimately, a place of confinement where people who belong to a generic group are locked up, according to the most common definitions of concentration camps.
The person interviewed by Cubanet presents it as a business. The “guardians” of the shelter open the doors to those who need to enter and thus justify requesting resources for the center. But access has a high cost: entry is paid for with mistreatment and the deplorable diet to which they are subjected.
Tony has been to Las Guásimas more than once, due to the lack of a roof under which to sleep. “They justify the presence of those who picked up things on the street to steal them,” said the man.
Although the regime boasts of investing in social assistance and provide help to those who need it, this discourse is nothing more than part of the State’s demagogy.
“The food is terrible, for breakfast there is water, sugar and half a loaf of bread.” This is a space to destitution and total abandonment.
Scabies, bedbugs and a general lack of hygiene plague the place. “The bedbugs are eating men. They are nudescovered in shit, with their clothes covered in shit everywhere,” Tony said.
Food shortages, unsanitary conditions and untreated illnesses have become lethal and have claimed the lives of many people. “It is a concentration camp where they are killing. There are eleven dead in ward A where I was. There were two and from there on nine, that is 11. There are eleven dead there.”
From the street to the slaughterhouse, it seems to be the natural route followed by the fate of those who end up in the center.
According to Tony’s experience, the entrance is like a prison system. The “street dwellers” are taken to the shelter and led down an embankment “where you can’t even see where you’re going.”
“You arrive there. They take your name, your details, your ID card and in the morning they let you go… and if you don’t have a cent, you won’t have anywhere to go or anything to do,” he said.
Many elderly people are in this situation, helpless. “The situation that the elderly are living is sad. The situation is terrible. If you don’t have money, you are left with nothing because they don’t give you transport or money, but they let you go.”
For Tony, it’s simple: it’s another of the regime’s businesses with which they justify and divert money that doesn’t end up in the social works they tout.
“They never gave me a chicken thigh. They even gave me white rice, bread, and sweet potato for lunch,” he said.
Spaces in the bunks are assigned as long as they can fit: “If you arrive immediately, the beds of those who are already dead are the ones that you get, as long as you can fit them. If there are no beds, you have to sleep in a hallway or in a doorway.”
Left to their own devices, the homeless, mostly elderly, who come to the centre end up dying there. “They die from illnesses they have, one because he is diabetic and had his leg cut off; others, from other illnesses.”
Surrounded by garbage, the former Latin American Solidarity School emerges as a center for death, for waiting for death, for disappearance.
“What is the epidemic? The epidemic is being produced by the government itself. What are the diseases? The government itself,” Tony concluded.
