14ymedio, Pedro Espinosa, Havana, 21 December 2023 — The belongings of old Orlando, whom everyone in Havana knows as El Barba [The Beard], can be counted on the fingers of one hand. With fingers left over. A quilt, a couple of shirts, some pants, his crutch and a small box. His 86 years are also part of the inventory – it is what weighs the most on him – and he has lived them, at least the last few decades, on the streets.
Every morning, Orlando opens his eyes and sees the facade of a bar, next to the dilapidated Saratoga Hotel. Since he sleeps in a corner of the doorway, the bar is the closest thing he has to a house. So that he can go out to “work,” the employees store the quilt and the clothes that he is not going to wear that day.
Like all beggars, Orlando remembers a previous life. “I had a house with everything inside, but my family made a mess for me. They sold it, furniture and everything, and left the country,” he tells 14ymedio from the sidewalk of La Moderna Poesía, the famous bookstore – also abandoned – in the Bishop Street.
Passing children point to Orlando’s long beard. Passersby greet him and leave what they can in the cardboard box, which used to hold bottles of Havana Club rum. “It’s all a story and a lie,” he insists to those who ask him why he has not demanded assistance from the authorities. “I have gone to the municipal government several times. They have never given me the time of day, they have never wanted to help me.”
William, a neighbor by trade and on the street of El Barba, does not sleep in any doorway but in “a little house” on Avenida del Puerto. With all the patience in the world, and sometimes pushed by a n