"Guanabacoa, avant -garde of drugs and everything bad"

Havana/Guanabaco is a city but also countryside. Urban and rural, this municipality of Havana has traditionally been a headache for the police that can barely monitor its recesses, its marginal neighborhoods and all the vast network of the informal market in the area. Now, drugs have also found in that part of the Cuban capital a den for traffic and expansion.

“Here you can hide a stolen motorcycle as a laboratory to Breaking Bad“comments to 14ymedio Yoel, very concerned about the increase in the presence of narcotics in the town where he lives with his wife and children of 23 and 27 years. “I go out and are those boys half zombies that everyone knows that that shit in the body has gotten into.”

He chemical It is the most popular drug right now in Havana. Although the formula may vary according to who prepares it, its base is synthetic marijuana mixed with drugs, some destined to the treatment of epilepsy, and some tranquilizer or anesthetic. A dose can cost between 300 and 500 pesos, depending on the concentration and quality of its ingredients.

Within his concerns, Yoel feels that his situation is not as bad as the families residing in parts of the municipality marked by an increase in marginality. “At least our house is quite central, but if you move away from this part you can find anything, the chemical and Ambrose They are ending the youth here. ”

Ambrosea drug mixture which includes animals anesthetics, especially ketamine, is made from stolen medications from nearby state farms where they are raised from pigs to horses. “The other day my neighbor’s 12 -year -old grandson suddenly fell in the middle of the street and the first thing we thought was that he had lowered hunger sugar, but it was that he had consumed that thing,” adds Yoel.

“It is not just that they kill themselves, it is that more and more cases of robberies are heard, assaults on the streets, even of family broncas that end by slabs, to obtain the money they need to buy the chemical“The man says that” most parents and grandparents do not report because they do not want their children and grandchildren to put imprisoned, but when you see an old man with a purple eye it was probably a struggle at home to take away some pesos. ”

Given the situation in the streets, families are raising the tone of the demands to the police. The constant complaints and complaints, especially in the Facebook pages linked to local authorities, seem to have promoted a wave of operations against traffickers who have allowed several arrests in recent days.

On Friday night “an important operation was performed that reminds us that surveillance never stops,” A profile in social networks linked to state security. The brief information classified the offensive as surprise: “They captured a trafficker, who at first seemed that he did not carry anything, but in a thorough review it was revealed that he carried wrappers of the famous chemical hidden inside a bottle, “he adds, next to a photo of the young man arrested and the container with a dozen small paper wrappers.

The arrest of Chemiqueroas the drug distributors are popularly called, it happened in the neighborhood of Havana Nueva, an area that borders the municipality of Rule and with a majority of very poor residents. “Guanabacoa is avant -garde in these things, avant -garde in everything bad, here you find yourself More garbage And more drugs than in other municipalities, “says a neighbor who saw the police cars pass on the night of the operation.” They take one and sprout ten, because this municipality is turned on from drugs on all four sides, “he says.

For its part, the official profile that spread the capture of the seller of chemical On Facebook he said that in the municipality “there is no place for drug trafficking” and called the neighbors to report any suspicious performance. But Yoel believes that the situation is already out of control and that the general deterioration of Guanabacoa contributes to it very difficult to cut by the healthy with the sale of the sale of the chemical and of Ambrose. “It is not just drugs, here you live permanently in illegality.”

According to this Guanabacoense, “here we are accustomed to avoiding the police, to solve our life many times outside the law and that is taken advantage of by criminals. There are areas where people cannot report that there is a trafficker poisoning their children because that costs him a stab.” In his opinion, “they click you, they kill you and nobody pays you because in the middle of a dark street anything can happen to you, then they are lost in a scrub and who finds them.”