Overwhelmed by garbage, the settlers of Manzanillo fear the arrival of a new epidemic

Manzanillo (Granma)/“I woke up for the discomfort in my chest and with a lack of air. They were more than 2 in the morning and believed that something burned. It was in the morning, when I took the child to the semi -internate, which I saw five blocks from my house A metal container that burned with all kinds of waste. ”

This is how Gisela explains why he had to take a new tour to take his son to the school with which to avoid the garbage dump in front of a playground and a medical office. “What began in a corner with a nylon bag, today is a mountain of wads, debris and dead animals.”

“The communal ones take so long to collect the garbage that the container overflows. They tell you that the truck broke, that there is no fuel. It is always something,” he laments. “In spring, supposedly, the neighbors set fire to scare away the mosquitoes , but it is no longer justified. What better or think about what you breathe or get into your eyes. ”

The city, once synonymous with culture and splendor, today blurs from the map. Manzanillo has gone from being the pearl of the guacanayabo, to a huge open sky.

“There is no one who lives here,” says Eduardo, a neighbor of La Kaba, an agricultural market. “The same pulls the garbage of the houses that the decomposed merchandise of the pallets. They believed that they were going to solve it with an iron drawer but it was worse.” The inability of communal services, subordinated to the municipal government, to do their job and that, in addition to ruining the ornament, legitimize the landfills.

“It takes a century to empty it and in the meantime you have to swallow all that filth. In the surroundings there are coffee shops and it already disgusts for flies and plague, “says Eduardo, who remembers better times.

“There was a time when you did not see so much dirt in the streets. They came to hire trucks that were quite efficient. Then they did not follow because they paid them very little and the purge honey for the food of the horses rose in price. Even that affected that in that The closure of the sugar plants, “he sentence. The same happened in the tunas, where the contracted carts For communal services they were planted by low wages and bad conditions.

“With the garbage dumps, the Divers. It is terrible that someone survives like this. They dig scrap, firewood or anything they can sell. It is depressing, but I have seen elderly eating rotten fruits that boot street vendors. We have arrived at that extreme. ”

Despite the pride they have always demonstrated for their city, the settlers of Manzanillo admit that it has entered an unstoppable spiral of decay.

They fear that at any time a new epidemic such as Covid arrives, this time caused by pollution and unhealthiness. And what saddens them is to see children and the elderly who, pushed by the need, rule in the garbage for a piece of metal or an empty can of beer that can be exchanged for food.