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Posted on 11/04/2025 10:41:44 AM PST by Miami Rebel
“Every morning a war breaks out here, you know?” whispers the wrinkled old woman who, that evening, invited me into her shack — an improvised shelter of aluminum, cardboard and wood.
“Sometimes they kill each other over a piece of copper,” she added.
Then, she pointed out the window, where fires smolder in the distance. Basurero de la Calle 100, Havana: Cuba’s largest garbage dump. A place where, every few days, bodies are dragged off its paths. A place where people kill to live one more day. A place so forsaken that even the police dare not enter.
Our hostess, like so many others, came here years ago hoping to find a quick way out of poverty. In the middle of the endless garbage fields — expanded each morning by heavily loaded trucks — a bustling trade had formed, drawing people from across the island. So much so that the woman, then about forty, was willing to sell her small hut in eastern Cuba. A bitter irony.
The trade follows a simple yet merciless cycle: each morning, government trucks force their way through massive mounds of waste to the hills of the settlement, where they unload their cargo — the remnants of Havana’s colossal refuse. At that moment, men, women, children and the elderly pour out of the collapsing shacks at the foot of the hills, rushing with torn sacks onto the smoking dump.
There, amid burning heaps spewing toxic fumes, they dig frantically for scraps of recyclable material to stuff into their bags. Again and again, deadly incidents occur — sometimes from sudden eruptions of violence, sometimes from hunger or disease.
For hours, figures in rags claw through the trash without food or water, until, in the evening, drenched in sweat and staggering under heavy loads, they stumble down the narrow paths to sell their gains for a pittance to scrap dealers who have set up along the settlement’s edge. Just enough for a meager meal. Or for a bottle. Only to return the next day and fight the same degrading battle again.
Months, years, decades — until the wasted body gives out. Or until addiction consumes what remains. Alcohol, that ever-present demon, ruins destinies, families, and entire communities. Or the synthetic drugs that have circulated on Havana’s streets in recent years.
Every person here faces the same cruel choice: survive or forget. To drag oneself through another day of hell, or to slip — at least for a moment — into the sweet hands of intoxication. Survival and forgetting are impossible to combine here. The means are simply too scarce. Fathers spend their last peso on a hit while their children wander the alleys hungry. Mothers send their children onto the dump, desperate to scrape together money for a pitiful meal. Teenagers never learn to read or write, because it would make no difference.
It’s a vicious cycle. Whoever comes here rarely leaves — not for generations. Instead, families linger in shacks of tin and cardboard, swept away again and again by cyclones. No one dares to dream. Dreams are a luxury of others, “of those who don’t care if we die like flies,” our hostess throws at me, her eyes burning.
And yet it is a pastor who brought me to this place of the outcast. The shack where I now sit slumped on a broken stool is the meeting place of his congregation, named “Mount Sinai” by its resident, the first member of his flock.
“This hut doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to God,” she tells me with a smile. “Only he owns land here.” She says she wakes up each day with the firm belief that God will provide food. “I don’t fight that fight anymore. I just trust that something will be there by evening, and however little it may be, we thank him and share it with as many as we can.”
Day after day, she gives everything she has, never knowing if she will survive to the next. She pointed to her 84-year-old mother, collapsed in a corner of the room with her eyes cast down: “She taught me that whoever enters this house must eat from what there is — even if there are hundreds.”
Pastor Ismael, a stocky man with leathery skin sat quietly beside me, recalled in a low voice his first days here, when he arrived two years ago at the urging of a friend who oversees aid shipments from Germany. “At the beginning, I sat every evening on the train tracks over there and wept. But I knew I couldn’t leave them anymore.”
Since then, he has distributed food and medicine throughout the settlement, reinforced some of the shacks regularly torn apart by tropical storms, and cleared the main road of trash.
A drop in the ocean — but enough to gather a congregation of some fifty people, meeting weekly at “Mount Sinai.”
“They come for the bread and stay for the word,” he explains. Over time, they have formed a kind of communal economy, each household contributing whatever it can. Our hostess gestures toward a young woman with a child in her arms standing in the doorway: “We always drink coffee at her place in the morning, if there is any.”
When I ask why these people should trust him, Pastor Ismael answers: “Because we are the only ones who can give without demanding. Because they cannot imagine that someone could love them. Once they grasp that, they cannot help but stay.”
The revolutionary act of giving in the midst of a system of brutal dependencies, where everything costs more than it is worth. Enough to topple an entire world. Or, in the words of the French philosopher Simone Weil: “Grace is fullness, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it.”
Where a desperate, merciless struggle for survival devours all that is human, an outstretched hand can be the most radical gesture imaginable.
This is how philosopher Jacques Derrida described what he called “unconditional hospitality”: “To give the newcomer one’s entire home, one’s entire self, without asking a name, or compensation, or fulfillment, or even the smallest condition.”
This is a disposition so deeply internalized by the members of this congregation that they are ready at any moment to give everything to save someone closer to death than themselves. Concretely, it means they welcome anyone who steps into their meager homes.
They offer the best of the little they have, knowing that such generosity may cost them everything in a matter of days if the miracles that keep them alive should cease. Perhaps it is precisely the void Simone Weil spoke of — the immediate awareness of one’s dependence, and the willingness to accept it again and again — that here creates space for a communion that might otherwise seem impossible.
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Communism good, da?
NYC is voting for this right now.
We didn’t take advantage of Iran’s protests in ‘09 as The Kenyan was in charge. If it were to happen now would we fan the flames?
Fast forward a couple of years and this becomes a good snapshot of what NYC will look like. For those Socialists who still think it’s better than capitalism, explain why Cuba has a Socialistic state that is still a massive failure after more than 70 years of existence. Indeed, without foreign aid (mainly from Russia in the early years), Socialism would have died long ago.
“Basurero de la Calle” — “Garbage Street” sums it up.
I remember when the Soviet Union was crumbling and the East Germans were rising up before the wall came down. There was an excellent article about how communist regimes don’t care one whit for the environment and how East Germany was covered in environmental / ecological disasters. There was one fluorescent bulb manufacturing plant with toxic waste everywhere.
Some things never change.
Yet, the ignorant people always say that, without capitalism, such things would never happen in a communist paradise where the people rule. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Les Miserables, multiplied by 30.
Some vast areas of Brazil are said to be a lot like this.
“Sometimes they kill each other over a piece of copper,”
Who says communism doesn’t work?
The only reason we don’t have people living near garbage dumps to scavenge is because in our country (thankfully) we tightly regulate access to such facilities. Instead, we have the homeless and others roaming the streets of our big (Democrat run) cities, dumpster diving and rifling through waste containers for recyclables and half-eaten food. See it all the time.
Future NYC
Ah, the workers' paradise!
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