People must deposit solid waste in designated areas starting at 6:00 p.m.
14ymedio, Havana, 21 August 2024 — Havana’s municipality of Cerro has turned to a private company to collect the mountains of garbage that have accumulated for months in the streets. In the area, one of the most densely populated in the Cuban capital, Talleres Delis was hired “to improve communal hygiene,” the official media Canal Habana reported on Tuesday.
The company was founded by Delis Antonio Espinosa Hernández and, according to the Ministry of Economy and Planning’s list of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises ( MSMEs), is dedicated to the maintenance and repair of motor vehicles. At the end of last year, Espinosa Hernández himself announced, in an interview with Tribuna de La Habana, that he intended to “insert himself in the search for solutions to the problems of transportation and Communal Services.”
He explained that the repair work carried out by the company was a “quasi-rescue” and a “reconstruction” of vehicles of all kinds – including buses used for state transport – that arrived at his workshop “practically unusable.”
Less clear is the result obtained in the municipality of Diez de Octubre, where they also prepared “recovered trucks” to collect garbage, an action similar to the one that will now be carried out for Cerro.
This is not the first time a government entity has hired him. Others already did so, he said, during the Covid-19 pandemic, in Mayabeque and Artemisa.
The municipality’s authorities argue that they cannot cope with the collection of waste due to a lack of personnel, fuel and equipment. For this reason they made an “agreement” with the Espinosa Hernández MSME to improve the fleet of equipment destined for garbage collection “especially on the most important avenues in the area.”
Other measures taken by the authorities to alleviate the pr
