Conditions in communist Cuba are worsening, forcing a record number of the country's citizens to rummage through garbage in search of food and other basic necessities.
The country's collapsed infrastructure has led to massive heaps of trash throughout the country (especially in the capital of Havana), as their garbage and disposal services have become barely functional.
Breitbart News reports:
The mounting garbage dumps, extreme poverty conditions, food shortages, and hunger prompted a surge in the popularity of buzos, or “divers”: individuals who desperately rummage through piles of garbage to find something to eat or sell for their sustenance. In a “good” month, divers reportedly earn only $17 at most.
Cubanet stressed in its report that the growing piles of garbage and desperate Cubans searching for food in them is not a situation isolated to Havana. Another report published in February indicated that more than 70 individuals gather daily in a garbage dump located near a Havana highway to search for food.
One Cuban local told Cubanet, “I find a pizza, I pick it up. I find a bit of spaghetti, I pick it up; a bit of rice, a piece of chicken I pick it up, because that's what we live on.”
A woman told the outlet, “They throw good things in the garbage. Look, this bread is top-notch. And so I found a pumpkin, too.”
An elderly man picking through debris acknowledged the indignity of their circumstances, but insisted that people could maintain a moral code even in extreme poverty. “The situation forces you to do things. What you don't have to do is steal from anyone.”
The situation in Cuba is similar to that of Venezuela, despite Venezuela's communist revolution being more recent. It's been reported that at least 15% of the Venezuelan population has been forced to scavenge garbage for food, with that number spiking between 2014 and 2017.
Breitbart News continues:
Cuba is enduring an extremely dire humanitarian crisis stemming from more than six decades of communism under the authoritarian Castro regime. The communist-caused humanitarian crisis and the Castro regime's gross mismanagement have caused the decline of the country's population and the worst migrant crisis in Cuba's history.
Nearly 90 percent of the remaining population now lives in conditions of extreme poverty in addition to other inhumane living conditions fueled by the collapse of Cuba's infrastructure. Power blackouts and shortages of water, food, medicine, and other supplies are common, and Cubans have no access to adequate healthcare.
In 2019, the state-sponsored radio station urged citizens to eat banana and plantain peels and use them as painkillers and skin cleansers amid extreme food and medicine shortages.
“Plantain or banana is one of the most consumed fruits in the world. What you might not know is that the peel is just as nutritious as the interior: it contains iron, potassium, and vitamins B, C, and K and, if that were not enough, also contains good amounts of manganese, fiber, antioxidants, and copper.”
Around the same time, they also began arresting citizens that had fallen ill with communicable diseases in an attempt to curb the spread.
