HAVANA TIMES – It’s still early. The garbage truck is approaching. The stench of rotting waste hits you like a sledgehammer in the face, but old Pastor is impervious to it. He’s immune to foul odors. Tucked tightly under his left arm, pressed against his ribs, he carries his liter of lavagallo, the cheapest kind of liquor, the kind you don’t buy to have a good time, but to give your stomach a fiery jolt before plunging into the city’s refuse.
One long, straight swig to tackle the day’s work with renewed vigor.
In Venezuela, we have the luxury of a Ministry of Eco-Socialism. On television and in the chatter of high-ranking officials, they speak eloquently about the three Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. To Pastor, our urban scavenger, these are strange notions imported from abroad for people who eat three meals a day and have time to think about the planet.
At the garbage dump, Pastor’s domain, nobody is concerned about saving turtles or protecting the environment. Nobody gives a damn about the ozone layer when their stomach is growling with hunger. There is no “ecological awareness” here. What exists is pure, hard-core mining, a savage scramble for survival where men, women, boys, girls, the elderly, and animals fight over the spoils.
For the old man, and for the women and children who circle the garbage trucks like vultures, the black trash bag coming out of an apartment building isn’t waste. It’s a treasure chest that well-off people, in their haste, left half-full. Hard plastic is sold by the kilo to the scrap dealer. What some consider garbage takes on different meanings and uses for these nomads.
The real tragedy isn’t just that people have to eat out of the garbage, but how quickly the gulf between us has widened. While politics has become the most lucrative business of all—that magic wand that, in just a couple of months, transforms a penniless nobody into a well-connected regime insider, complete with an armored SUV—at the garbage dump, the only social mobility is downward.
Up there, inside the bubble of armored SUVs, mansions with swimming pools, gourmet grocery stores, cash dollars, and foreign universities for their children, garbage is just filthy stuff that disappears as soon as the building superintendent or the maid takes the trash cans out to the street. There, in their mansions with swimming pools and their bellies full, they tell one another stories about “sustainable development.”
Down here, old Pastor’s only investment was the liter of lavagallo he bought with the few coins he had left from yesterday. With a long swig straight from the bottle, he summons the courage to plunge his hands among broken glass and shit-filled diapers in search of a “find”: a clump of cold rice stuck to a Styrofoam tray or a half-full can of sardines that some rich person tossed away without a second thought.
Later, at home, surrounded by a broken-down sofa, old rags, and a heap of scrap metal, he lies down to sleep, covered by the cardboard of the homeland.
He passes out, “anesthetized” by the cheap booze.
Meanwhile, “the woman in charge of the whole mess”—and what an acting president she is—appears on television talking about the victory achieved: Venezuela is now a territory of “zero hunger.”
Read more from Antígona Urbano’s diary here in Havana Times.