14ymedio, Havana, 29 September 2024 — From the satellite cameras it looks like a stain on the outskirts of Matanzas. Those who walk by have the impression of visiting a museum of Cuban ruins from the last 20 years. It is the city’s landfill, “founded” – if the word can be used – in 2003 by the authorities in an old quarry four kilometers from the Central Highway. The Communist Party newspaper in the province defines it as an “old lavatory dug in the stone.”
On Saturday, the official press published photographs of the place, where – according to the Communal Services – 700 cubic meters of waste are thrown every day. Without offensive words, the report lets the images speak for themselves. Vultures resting on a bicycle handlebar, satisfied after devouring the remains of food; pigs – “hundreds of them” – refreshing themselves in a mud puddle; herons of an immaculate white circling over the mounds, in search of rodents and banana peels.
When there is fuel, the Communal Services trucks collect the garbage from Matanzas, skirt the University of Medical Sciences and arrive at the dump, visible on Google Maps. The data, Girón reflects, are useless. Only two types of people go to the citadel of garbage: those who work there and those who benefit from the landfill.
Among the latter there are not only dumpster divers – for whom each mound is a buffet: they take everything they can carry – but also farmers who release their animals so that they can find food themselves. Not only the pigs attest to this, but also a black and white cow that, in a panoramic view of the garbage dump published by the newspaper, appears as a tiny figure among mountains of waste.
The quarry belonged to a guajiro named Conrado Marrero, whose land was exchanged for “a few hectares” of land in a less rough area of the province. Originally it was a gap; now it has grown and – Girón calculates – the amount of garbage that is thrown for four days could fill an Olympic pool.
The garbage dump of the University of Medical Sciences has two “younger brothers”: one in Guanábana and the other in Ceiba Mocha, also in the vicinity of the city. But none receives as much garbage as the first, and if it has seen a relief in recent months it is because the Communal Services trucks do not have the fuel to keep up. The garbage that is missing in the landfill, however, remains in the streets of Matanzas, which threatens to become the fourth and most unhealthy landfill in the region.
The enumeration of objects by the newspaper touches on pathos: a “dirty teddy bear” next to an anachronistic CUC bill; coffins that have lost their nails and linings; underwear, condoms, toilet paper and stripped cables; “clumps of rice, blackened tomatoes, red beans covered with white fungus”; and pigs, many pigs.
The case of these animals is peculiar. The landfill caretaker reports that they escape from neighboring farms and live there, wild. Testimony of this is that their fur is short and black, their body is agile, and they are frightened when they hear the steps of those who go to the garbage dump. There are also chickens, rats and flies, in addition to frequent territorial disputes between “roosters and vultures” over a portion of land.
There are also jejenes – gnats – that not only “are big enough to carry you” but also transmit dengue fever, the Oropouche virus and other arboviruses. The only human sign – in addition to the mountains of waste – is a wooden shed and a bulldozer that keeps the debris at bay. “When the wind directs the stench towards the guard house, it smells like a decomposing corpse,” says the caretaker.
To that smell is added the stench of burning. Its cause is also unusual: a spontaneous fire in the landfill began four months ago and has not yet been completely extinguished. The bulldozer operator has tried in vain to cover it with dirt and they left it like that. It is the garbage gas that continues to fuel the fire, he explains.
The caretaker’s worst enemy is the dumpster divers. “They don’t like to be seen,” he points out, and he has instructions to “alarm them” by screaming. If they don’t leave, which often happens, he has to call the police. The guard has another task: to classify waste for Raw Material, but he hasn’t done it for a while.
The Girón reporters admit to having left the place devastated. The only authority in the landfill seems to be the vultures, which spread their wings on the mounds to warn strangers who is in charge in each sector. One of them – it can be seen in the photos – looks insistently at the city of Matanzas.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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