Havana/Hundreds of brigades took to the streets of Havana this Friday to collect the mountains of accumulated garbage that flood the city, a health problem that is now impossible to ignore, aggravated by the energy crisis in Cuba that has severely affected the Community Service.
The Prime Minister, Manuel Marrero, declared on state television that more than 450 brigades, made up mainly of soldiers, are deployed in several Havana municipalities to collect solid waste.
“We are satisfied with the response in this mobilization. We ask the population to join because we win when we unite. We are going to continue fighting despite the difficulties,” he stated.
Marrero presumed that ministers, directors of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) and the central government are participating in the task; officers and soldiers of the Armed Forces and the Ministry of the Interior, who have contributed with equipment, in addition to the population itself.
Garbage accumulation has become a critical public health problem.
The Cuban Government has described the “sanitation” of Havana as a priority issue, since the accumulation of garbage has become a critical public health problem. The accumulation of waste in the streets of Cuba has reached health emergency levels that are getting worse every day. The situation is due to the extreme shortage of fuel and breakdowns in the collection trucks, which has disabled a large part of the Cuban Community Service.
According to official data, Havana, with about 1.75 million inhabitants, generates about 23,814 cubic meters of waste daily, of which more than two thirds correspond to the activity of “household services and waste.”
The overcrowding of waste in the streets and the irregularity of collection services have been reported on multiple occasions in recent months, mainly on social networks and in state media. The frequency of collection has been reduced in recent months in the capital and, sometimes, due to the accumulated volumes, it is carried out with excavators and dump trucks.
Cuba is going through a deep economic crisis, which is manifested in daily blackouts, chronic shortages of food and medicine, high inflation, and a severe shortage of foreign currency and fuel. The Cuban Government accuses the US embargo as the main cause of the lack of supplies. Independent experts also point to bureaucratic problems, management failures, neglect and lack of human capital due to the strong emigration that the country is experiencing.
