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.
