“What started in a corner with a small nylon bag, today is a mountain of branches, rubble and dead animals,” they say.
14ymedio, Carlos. A. Rodríguez, Manzanillo, Granma Province, 6 Febraury 2025 — “I woke up with chest discomfort and shortness of breath. It was after 2 in the morning, and I could tell that something was burning. In the morning, when I took my child to daycare, I saw a metal container burning all kinds of waste five blocks from my house.”
This is how Gisela explains why she has to follow a new route to take her son to school in order to avoid the garbage dump that is growing in front of a playground and a doctor’s office. “What started in a corner with a little nylon bag is today a mountain of branches, debris and dead animals.”
“The Comunales [Communal Services] take so long to collect the garbage that the container overflows. They tell you that the truck broke down, that there is no fuel. It’s always something,” she laments. “In spring, the neighbors set fire, supposedly to scare away mosquitoes, but it is no longer justified. Many of us think that the officials are really the ones who set the fires, so that there is less to collect. They burn sanitary pads, plastics or who knows what. Now we are in the dry season with a lot of wind, so it’s better not to think about what you breathe or what gets in your eyes.”
The city, once synonymous with culture and splendor, today is a distant memory. Manzanillo has gone from being the Pearl of the Guacanayabo to a huge open dump.
“There is no one living here anymore,” says Eduardo, a neighbor of La Kaba, an agricultural market. “They throw out garbage from the houses the same as the decomposed merchandise from the shelves. They thought they were going to solve it with a metal container but it made things worse.” He refers to the huge orange dumpsters scattered around the city center that have proliferated in the face of the inability of Communal Services, subordinated to the municipal government, to do its job, and which, in addition to ruining the ornamentation, legitimize the garbage piles.
“It will take a century to clean it up, and in the meantime you have to stomach all that filth. There are coffee shops in the surroundings, and they are now disgusting because of the flies and the plague,” says Eduardo, who remembers better times.
“There was a time when you didn’t see so much filth on the streets. They managed to hire carretoneros, horse-cart drivers, who were quite efficient. They stopped working because they were paid very little, and the raw honey for the horse feed went up in price. It even affected the closure of the sugar mills,” he said. The same thing happened in Las Tunas, where the carretoneros hired by Communal Services complained about the low wages and the terrible conditions.
“With the coming of the dumpsters, the ‘divers’ resurfaced. It’s terrible that someone survives like this. They dive in looking for scrap metal, firewood or anything they can sell. It’s depressing, and I’ve seen old people eat rotten fruit thrown away by street vendors. We have reached that extreme.”
Despite the pride they have always shown for their city, the residents of Manzanillo admit that it has entered an unstoppable spiral of decadence.
They fear that at any moment a new epidemic like COVID will arrive, this time caused by the contamination and the lack of sanitation. And what saddens them the most is to see children and the elderly who, pushed by necessity, rummage through the trash for a piece of metal or an empty can of beer that can be exchanged for food.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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