14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 18 July 2024 — The man is about 50 years old and carries two sacks loaded with empty soda, malt and beer cans. He heads to Lealtad Street, in Centro Habana, where the neighbors already know him, and sit on the threshold of their houses to watch his routine. The job, long-standing on the island but almost extinct due to the pandemic – which scared away tourism, a great consumer of these drinks – consists of precisely placing the containers on the asphalt and waiting. When a car finally crushes them, they will be ready to sell as raw material.
For at least four years – since Covid hit hard and the Yumas [foreigners] and the food disappeared – the collectors have hardly been seen in Havana. Their momentary disappearance, however, has not made them strangers to Cubans, whose imagination since childhood, along with other jobs on the Island — such as sharpening scissors or buying empty perfume bottles — still remembers “the old men who collect cans.”
They are almost always elderly, bent over by age and the weight of their bags. Most are men, but occasionally you see a woman.
The profession has a range of different collectors with regards to opportunities and resources. Some have tools to make their work easier, like the man who was carrying — on a tricycle and a wheelbarrow — sacks of cans of old Tu Kola, imported beers or the national Cristal and Bucanero beer this Wednesday on Belascoaín Street. Others, those in a worse situation, combine the activity with searching for food in the garbage, they go around in tattered clothes and with tanned faces.
Whether self-employed or not, colle
