Illegal burning of garbage begins to choke Havana

Havana/Just as the mountains of garbage In every corner of Havana in recent months, illegal burning is now multiplying. At dawn or dusk, day or night, neighbors set fire to the waste without any modesty. Smoke over the capital and black blades that fall on heads like snowflake negatives are becoming common, with the consequent risk to health.

“I think people are not aware of how dangerous it is to burn solid waste,” says a nurse resident in Central Havana. “But they don’t have any other alternative either. There are garbage dumps burning next to houses, parks, sports areas, wherever.”

Another Havana native from Guanabacoa tells 14ymedio that on Saturday, returning home at night, he saw a screen of smoke along his entire route along Vía Blanca. “At some times of the day the burning smell is constant,” he says. Not only in his municipality, he says, but throughout the city, burning garbage “is already a widespread practice because the trucks take a long time to pass or do not pass at all.”

“Better the smell of burning than the stench of all that filth,” says a resident of Plaza de la Revolución. There is no choice but to light a candle, he says, to eliminate the flies.

From his tall building he sees what he describes as “Sauron’s ring of waste”, in reference to the evil character of the lord of the rings: different garbage dumps that, in the absence of trucks to collect them due to the critical shortage of fuel, exacerbated by the United States oil blockade since the beginning of January, have come together. “The one that goes from Factor and Conill joins that of Estancia and Conill, which in turn joins that of Santa Ana and Estancia, which completes the circle with that of Factor and Santa Ana,” he lists, and regrets that since the temperatures began to rise, the smell is unbearable. Ironically with the plot of JRR Tolkien’s novel, he concludes: “A ring to suffocate them all.”

Two weeks ago, the official newspaper Cubadebate presented in a report some figures of the waste collection debacle: Havana has 10,000 garbage containers but needs between 20,000 and 30,000, and only between 16,000 and 17,000 cubic meters are being collected daily, when in the past it was collected between 25,000 and 30,000.

One of the main problems, said the media quoting officials, is not only the lack of fuel but the poor condition of the equipment: of 106 collection trucks, only 44 are working. “We are between 37% and 44% of technical availability, well below what is needed,” acknowledged Alexis González Inclán, a Communal Services official.

Another drawback is the lack of labor. There is little interest in being a sweeper Well, the basic salary that they received, which a few years ago was attractive, today according to González Inclán, “is a little more than 2,000 pesos,” while a carton of 30 eggs costs between 2,000 and 3,000 pesos or 300 a pound of rice in the informal market.

In a meeting on the issue, President Miguel Díaz-Canel criticized his staff for not having acted more quickly before the problem reached current levels. The Havana government presented 49 measures to address the piles of accumulated garbage, but so far the reality is that none have been seen to come to fruition, neither on paper nor in reality.