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Two El Rampeño workers pick up the garbage with their hands in El Vedado

14ymedio documented the scene on Friday at the park at 19th and M, with no brooms or dustpans, the same day an EFE report highlighted the project's electric tricycles. Of the 30 tricycles announced in June, the service started on 1 July with five.

«Not a broom, not even a dustpan»: two workers crouch to pick up with their hands the waste scattered across the park at 19th and M, in Havana's El Vedado, in the scene recorded on Friday by 14ymedio. One holds a small plastic box while the other picks papers and containers off the ground, and when they go back to the collection vehicle there is still waste left in the grass and around the trees. «Look at the collectors, how they work, with their hands!», a resident told the paper, in remarks translated by Yamacoa.

El Rampeño is a local development project that since July has been trying to ease the garbage collection crisis in part of the Plaza de la Revolución municipality. A report distributed by the EFE news agency highlights the work of some 15 electric tricycles that remove waste from restaurants, shops, markets, homes and tourist establishments, among them the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, with 40 workers and a charging station with 60 solar panels. The entrepreneur Yasier Hernández, 35, explained to the agency that the project combines private capital and sustainable technology in the face of the fuel shortage and the decay of municipal services. The vehicles make two rounds a day and the price announced for homes is 100 pesos a month.

When the project was presented at the end of June, its promoters announced 30 electric tricycles, some 70 workers, a solar charging station and door-to-door collection in 14 districts of the Rampa People's Council. The service began on 1 July with five of the 30 planned vehicles. In August, Pedro Garcés, president of the Rampa People's Council, acknowledged that the initial goal had not been met and that the tricycles promised by the Communist Party's Central Committee and the central government had not arrived in the expected number.

CiberCuba adds that Garcés noted the solar station at 23rd and J was still unfinished and criticized the delay in looking for charging alternatives during the blackouts. That outlet also recalls that at the start of the year only 44 of the capital's 106 collection trucks were operational because of fuel shortages and wear, and that the private management model with charges to residents is spreading to other territories: the mipyme Belmary has charged 100 pesos a month per home on the Isle of Youth since August, and Almaley S.R.L. began the contracting process for the Historic Center of Camagüey in September.

In other Havana neighborhoods the piles of waste are enough to block traffic. At the corner of Villanueva and Melones, in Luyanó, a front loader had to clear a mountain of garbage on a street that leads to the Miguel Enríquez hospital, known as La Benéfica. «They were a bunch of days with that mountain of garbage there», a neighbor told 14ymedio, in remarks translated by Yamacoa.

Sources: 14ymedio · CiberCuba

Data updated: 2026-10-24T05:30:00.000Z

Two El Rampeño workers pick up the garbage with their hands in El Vedado | Yamacoa Observatory