14ymedio, Julio César Contreras, Cienfuegos, 1 September 2024 — Never before had the Pearl of the South – once called that for its beauty – been at such risk of losing this appellation as now. In Cienfuegos, founded by 47 French settlers in 1819 and declared a World Heritage Site, today there is plenty of trash in the streets and the sewers are clogged. You do not have to move to peripheral areas to see the prevailing dirt. It is enough to go through a few central blocks to realize that the work of the Communal Services Company leaves much to be desired.
“The hygiene here is not even a shadow of what it was,” says Antonia, a neighbor of the emblematic Roma hotel, currently reduced to a dilapidated facade. “People are throwing garbage in the corners in disposable straw baskets, bags or whatever they find. All that remains on the sidewalks for days, without anyone worrying about picking up even the waste that accumulates in the sewer,” the woman complains.
According to the 58-year-old Cienfueguera, her nephew, who works as a driver on one of the garbage trucks of Comunales, has told her that “their working conditions are very bad. Many times they are forced to carry out trash collections with their bare hands, because they don’t even have gloves.” Trucks also do not pass with a frequency that allows the city to remain clean, because the “fuel allocated to their business, together with the lack of vehicles, causes cleaning cycles to be missed.”
You do not have to move to peripheral areas to verify the prevailing dirt
In this situation, i
