Havana Cuba. – We were walking intersecting streets from Calzada de Monte to Avenida Carlos III when a piece of board nailed to one of the power line poles and painted in yellow letters caught our attention.
The poster announced: “Pigs do not vote + garbage I will deliver the videos to the PNR” [sic].
The ad is located right in front of the ruins of what was once the Vázquez Building, at the intersection of Condesa and Campanario streets, in the neighborhood of The placesCenter Havana.
Beyond the “funny” that a priori It turns out reading the announcement (including misspellings), the threat accounts for the burden of the neighbors for having to coexist with such a public dump. “Every day the garbage grows without Comunales or community factors taking action on the matter,” according to Anselmo Fernández de La Vega, a 78-year-old resident of the place.
“A few years ago, the Rincón Martiano had its fence and benches where one could sit and get some fresh air, but little by little some people needed the fence and others the marble slabs on the benches. They even took the lamps, but nobody cares,” added the old man.
“People have always littered,” he continues, “but never like now, it’s as if at some point we had stopped being human beings to literally become pigs.”
A community worker from the area assured CubaNet, on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, that “the situation of waste collection in the capital is going through the worst of crises.”
“It seems,” says De La Vega, “that they wanted to erase the traces of prosperity that one day glamorized the streets of Havana, full of flourishing private businesses, lights, joy, and life; and the only way to erase all this is precisely by allowing the city to be destroyed and shit to bury us”.
