Garbage accumulates in any corner of the city and surrounds hospitals, schools and daycare centers with all that this implies for community health.Holguín smells like garbage.There is no other way to say it.You walk through the streets - even the most central ones - and you can find improvised landfills in the open, and flies and rodents sniffing in the rot, in broad daylight.Sometimes people snoop too.Nobody told me.I was able to see it when I visited Cuba in 2019 and nothing has changed since then.Or yes, it's much worse now, they tell me.At that time, I remember that I wrote to the local press (where I once worked) to ask them to take action on the matter.For me, the situation was alarming and so I let them know.But I had not been to Cuba for eight years: I understand that for those who live in that reality day by day, it is difficult to notice the brutal dimension of the deterioration.One of the problems facing the city of Holguín, my city, in addition to the lack of food, medicine and electricity, is the collection of solid waste.Garbage accumulates in any corner of the city and surrounds hospitals, schools and daycare centers, with all that this implies for community health.The lack of hygiene devours what was once one of the cleanest cities in Cuba.And the bad smell spreads from one end to the other of the city of parks.A mapping of 18 improvised landfills proves that the garbage surrounds the city center, in its four cardinal points.Wherever the wind blows, everyone breathes in the filth and inhales the stench of the useless.A couple of months ago, a complaint on Facebook showed the "concern in Reparto Zayas about the instability in garbage collection."The user said that being "weeks without the service causes large accumulations of solid waste and the consequent increase in rodents and vectors."His alert voice was addressed to the authorities so that they could solve the problem and accompanied it with a photo and a reference point: "This is on both sides of Clinic No. 1 and in front of the ETECSA board," he specified.Images taken just a few hours ago show a similar mound of filth on the same corner.In fact, between the Zayas neighborhood and the Gibara highway there are at least five landfills in less than four blocks.The one on the highway is one of the longest, since it covers approximately 300 meters, according to statements made to CiberCuba by those who suffer from the negligence of the authorities.Very close to one of them, in Cervantes between Carretera and Línea, there is a drain of sewage water that runs along the asphalt and pools in a pothole in the street and in the grass.“Hence what comes out of sewage.It is a river.And with a bad smell that I don't know how people can live with,” a woman from Holguin told this outlet.In the vicinity of these dumps there is a daycare center, a doctor's office, a pharmacy, a taxi stand and a polluted river - like almost all the tributaries that cross the city.Without counting the houses and that it is a densely populated area, framed in a city of more than 300 thousand inhabitants.The sources consulted by CiberCuba, who provided the recent evidence that we show in this work -although not their names, for fear of reprisals-, state that the situation has become unbearable and the authorities do nothing.There is a palpable concern among Holguin residents for the health of their loved ones and they no longer know where to turn, because no one seems to care what the town is going through.In 2019, an article in the provincial weekly Now!pointed to "the lack of fuel" -which today is even more critical- as an impediment for specialized collection cars (ampliroles) to carry out their usual collections.Without counting the other million that inhabit the province, for a population that only in the city generates some 1,620 tons of waste daily, the challenge is immense.For distributions and suburban areas, the article itself anticipated that the solution, according to Jesús Sablón Pupo, deputy director for Communal Hygiene care in the provincial capital, was to use animal-drawn means of transport, better known as carts.However, since then, there has been reluctance on the part of the cart drivers to carry out the work because, as ¡Now! pointed out, the 2,000 CUP that Comunales offered them as salary was not enough and there was no room for negotiation.But for those who live in the center, the situation is even more complex because, at least in Holguín, there is no news of purchases of this type of vehicle.How to dispose of the garbage and, at the same time, observe hygienic-sanitary regulations if there is no one to pick it up?Why doesn't the State invest in mechanized recycling trucks or, at least, in garbage deposits with covers to prevent waste from being exposed to the elements?The results are visible.Three years later, Holguín is sinking into garbage and viral diseases such as dengue are on the rise, as a result of the lack of hygiene fueled by the poor water supply and the constant blackouts, especially in recent weeks.The Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP) is another of those responsible in this story.Its mission is to ensure that hygienic-sanitary regulations are complied with and to demand from local authorities the necessary resources to combat diseases derived from poor sanitation in the city, as well as to inform the population of their incidence.Unfortunately, the MINSAP does not publish statistics or current data on dengue cases, it only clarifies, in an article from last March, that since 2007 there has been a growing trend in "high infestation rates by Aedes aegypti" and that, despite this, , "the country has been free of Zika since 2019 and Chikungunya since 2017."In the same way, it refers to percentages that do not say much or give a clear idea of ​​how worrying the increase they mention is.For example, they say that nine provinces were affected by dengue transmission during 2021, among which Holguín is in the group with the highest incidence of the virus.Others with a greater number of cases -of which it does not offer numbers or hospitalizations- are Camagüey, Villa Clara, Havana, and Santiago de Cuba.And people keep getting sick.On June 18, Cuban Yenys Fernandez, a resident of the Pueblo Nuevo neighborhood, expressly addressed health officials in a Facebook post.“Provincial health of Holguín, I make a call: Look how this street is, if you can call it a street.They don't go to pick up the garbage and only on this block has there been no child without dengue.The parents have taken them to the Pediatric and send them home, nobody comes to fumigate and the disease knocks from door to door without medicine and with nothing.Surprisingly, the MINSAP recognizes that "in the year 2021 the highest number of outbreaks of the last 15 years was reported", with the highest incidence in June, September and October, while assuring that "as of the month of September, they were reduced in 29.3% the cases of dengue with respect to 2020”.That is, according to the MINSAP, in 2021 there were more foci of the dengue transmitting agent than in the last five decades, however, there was a reduction of almost 30% of dengue cases in the month of high incidence of the virus.The foregoing could be explained if the sanitation work had increased, but this is hard to believe, because in 2021 the country applied social isolation measures to contain the coronavirus pandemic that substantially limited the performance of the autofocal and the work of the health institutions. vector control.Added to the above is the health crisis of that year, which concentrated the efforts and scarce resources of the Cuban health system on combating COVID-19, to the detriment of other diseases.Likewise, it is unknown how many cases of leptospirosis there are in the country that, due to the increase in the health crisis, the accumulation of garbage in the streets and the low availability of exclusion and sanitation resources to eliminate rodents, could well be experiencing a trend upward.In Cuba it is not common to find metal mesh for sale to seal the entry points of rats and mice that exist in the home.There are also no devices that emit electromagnetic waves to scare them away, nor are the currently unpopular traps and insecticides easily found.Furthermore, mosquito repellants are in short supply at the moment, according to statements made by Holguin residents to CiberCuba.Based on the foregoing, it is not difficult to conclude that the people are unaware of the impact on their health caused by the rot that is swarming like a new type of pandemic in the city of parks, and also throughout the country, for a long time. years.In February 2021, another article in the ¡Now!Titled “SOS, garbage on the street”, it once again warned about the crisis in solid waste collection in the midst of a “very complicated epidemiological situation due to arboviruses and COVID-19”, the text warned.Likewise, he pointed out the "quite unpleasant atmosphere in downtown streets, where ampliroll boxes remain overflowing with all kinds of waste and corners or spaces become micro-dumps."Now!He mentioned the specific case of “a landfill made by neighbors that almost takes over the Avenida Capitán and the esplanade next to the Mario Pozo Ochoa daycare center, where children, mostly the youngest in the institution, are exposed to bad odors and to the flutter of dirty papers”.A year and three months later, the situation had not been resolved and a mother turned to social networks to denounce the lack of hygiene in the place and its impact on the health of the children."This is inadmissible, I thought about it several times before publishing, but I think it is necessary to do it, since, when it comes to children, impotence eats away at you," said the mother.A few meters from the landfill is the Fernando de Dios Buñuel sports center and an agricultural market.To the garbage situation, the article added the sanitation problems of “the more than 36 thousand pits and a low percentage of sewage coverage in a province of more than one million inhabitants”;problems still latent four months later.Another local press outlet that joined the alert on the hygienic-sanitary situation due to the proliferation of micro-dumps was Radio Angulo, which in May of last year in which the technological equipment to collect waste has remained almost the same and does not satisfy the growing development needs of Holguín, which is one of the most populated cities in Cuba.It is estimated that each person generates around 1.5 kg of solid waste per day and many times these end up being piled up in the corners because there are not enough garbage containers, which are estimated at around 100 for the entire territory."The toxicity of waste left in the open air also deteriorates the quality of the air we breathe and emits greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide and methane) that contribute to climate change," indicates the Radio Angulo text and specifies that much of the Garbage is dumped into the Jigüe and Marañón rivers, which show signs of putrefaction in their waters.Today, shortly before the end of June 2022, garbage continues to dominate the urban landscape of the city of parks, and the once-fresh aroma of Holguín has become undesirable, almost as much as surviving in the vivid image of the misery that also devours the children of a dry land of hope and future.Do you have something to report?Write to CyberCuba:Like you, thousands of Cubans in Spain in the United States in Mexico in Canada read and support the independent journalism of CiberCuba.Our editorial independence begins with our economic independence: no organization from any country finances CyberCuba.We make our own agenda, we publish our opinions and we give a voice to all Cubans, without external influences.Our newspaper has been financed until today only through advertising and own funds, but that limits what we can do.This is why we ask for your 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