By Pedro Pablo Morejon
HAVANA TIMES – Down the street from where my partner lives, in the same garbage dumpster where the dead baby showed up, an old man devours some rotten tomatoes he seems to have picked out of there. It’s something she saw on Sunday, but it’s similar to the image I see every morning: elderly men and others not so elderly, dirty and poorly dressed, rummaging through the garbage.
It’s the burden of poverty that most Cubans are suffering and is hitting the most vulnerable especially hard. Those who worked their entire lives and are now scraping by on a measly pension; those who don’t even receive this pension; those with nobody abroad to help alleviate their needs; those who are sick and alone, and those who aren’t alone but their families can’t help them anymore…
This is why it’s not strange to find people asking for money any day, at any time, rummaging around in the garbage, or selling trinkets just to get by. It has nothing to do with the postcard images the regime and its accomplices are selling to the world of a Cuba with beaches, beautiful women,