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Diario de Cuba: police remove homeless people from Centro Habana streets in a "clean-up" operation
The independent outlet reported on Wednesday, based on an official Facebook post, on an operation along Galiano, Reina, Belascoaín and Infanta streets; the report does not say how many people were taken away or to which institutions.
The National Revolutionary Police and the Centro Habana local government removed people described as "vagrants" from several main streets of Havana during an operation presented as a "clean-up", according to Diario de Cuba, which cites a post published on Tuesday by Habana Noticias on Facebook. The operation covered Galiano, Reina, Belascoaín and Infanta streets.
According to that post, the people were taken to care centres, but the receiving institutions are not identified, nor is the number of people taken away. The text says they were carrying "useless objects" that "affected the image of the city", and sums up the day with the phrase "clean street, pretty neighbourhood and people cared for as they should be", in remarks translated by Yamacoa. The report also does not give the date of the operation or say whether the people agreed to be admitted, Diario de Cuba notes.
Similar operations have been carried out in recent years, according to that newspaper. In June 2025, the Havana government's website reported that every morning a bus went out with social workers and police officers to pick up people in Old Havana, Centro Habana and Plaza de la Revolución, with some 30 transfers a day, and that admission was supposed to be voluntary and to last up to 90 days.
There is no up-to-date national figure for people in this situation. Diario de Cuba reported in March that the authorities had identified some 3,690 people with "vagrant behaviour" between 2014 and 2023, a cumulative record that is not a census, and that 843 were counted in Havana in October 2023. Official publications from June 2025 state that 87% of the people cared for in centres were men and that 30% had some form of disability.
Lawyer Maylin Fernández Suris, of that newspaper's legal team, linked the phenomenon to inadequate wages and pensions, inflation, the housing shortfall and the weakening of social assistance. The outlet also gathered testimony about how short-lived the institutional solutions are: "They pick them up, take them to a centre, and then they come back to the street", a resident of Old Havana said, in remarks translated by Yamacoa.
Sources: Diario de Cuba
Data updated: 2026-11-11T16:15:00.000Z