With so much garbage to collect in Havana, there is no sweeper to endure

Havana/The man dropped on the sidewalk, in the shadow of a demolished wall. It could be a beggar – it is not rare that hunger or alcohol collapse many about the pavement – but it is a sweeper. Next to him, the tools of his work: two broken buckets and a rechobillon, set to a truck in which there is no more.

That the street is full of garbage suggests that what knocked him there was not the rum or the chemical – The dangerous and usual Cuban anesthesia against reality – but the excess of landfills in the city. A single nory ox, pray the Creole saying; A single sweeper is not enough against the capital cochambrero.

The complaints and protests have been valid, the calls to order, the claims to communal services. To the sweeper on foot, without gloves to operate, without inputs to fulfill his task, an inhuman work is presented: save the one that is the dirtiest city in Cuba.

That is why the man, dressed and footwear with rags, looks in the “gloomy” a truce for the overwhelming Creole sun and the no less torturing city strip that has to overcome. Next to him pass the cars with state sheet with his usual indifference. In the corner there is a house of dirt either.

In a while he will walk again, barely replied, to continue “in La Luchita”, a diminutive who does not soften the mountains that literally will find in his path. In Cayo Bone, Centro Habana, a short distance from the “fallen”, a grotesque landfill continues to challenge passers -by and hindering traffic.

It is the hospital dump, ironic not only by the name of the street in which it is nestled, but for its resistance to any collection maneuver. What person, armed only with a broom and two buckets, could end with such a portentous accumulation of papers, peels, jabs, excrements and liquids?

The only ones who dare to launch expeditions to that kind of landfills are the Diversdresses and armed with the same precariousness of the sweeper, who try to make the need virtue, or if not virtue at least food and raw material. In exchange for some kilosthe State will pretend to pay the divers – generally elderly or needy – the useful “treasures” they find. It is the closest that has been taking a real measure in favor of street hygiene.

That the situation is totally uncontrolled knows it until the official press. The reporters financed by the Communist Party have not been able to hide their disgust against the landfills that multiply in almost any corner of the country.

Some – like the one signed by an article published Tuesday on the Matancera Radio website – shouts a solution. However, they continue to attribute to rot an origin as remote as Washington. “The blockade exists and affects each of the spheres of Cuban society, and that is something that at least for the moment you have to live,” said the journalist.

With the photo of a silly dog ​​also collapsed – exactly in the same position as the Barrendero de la Habana – on a Matanzas dump, the article lists the dirtiest municipalities: Matanzas, Cárdenas, Colón, Perico, Jagüey Grande and Jovellanos.

The amount of MSMEs approved by the State has been directly proportional to the growth of the garbage dumps

Alludes to a provincial government meeting where the conclusion was that, precisely in those places, the amount of MSMEs approved by the State has been directly proportional to the growth of the garbage dumps. It is not the first time that the “new enemy” of hygiene is pointed out, but without declaring what the authorities will do with the garbage that already exists.

Where are the “almost 1,000 liters of fuel that are distributed daily in Matanzas” – or in the rest of the provinces -, according to the rest of the provinces – Radio 26? The station does not explain it.

He does not explain either Workers – Another of the official newspapers that have commented on the garbage crisis That month – what will Havana do to contain a reality that has disfigured in a matter of years, in its own words, a “clean city.”

“Create social awareness” is the only solution offered by the regime. But what awareness – social, personal or any kind – can remain to a man who, face to face with the landfill, falls collapsed by a mission clearly impossible.