Vendors offer items rescued from garbage piles under the arcades of Reina Street, Havana's most stately avenue. The scene emerged during a shopping errand amid shortages of basic goods. Yoani Sánchez recounts her observations while seeking welding rods and hot dogs.
Yoani Sánchez, in an article by 14ymedio, describes a morning in Havana driven by the need for home repairs and scarce food items. She wakes at 3 a.m. to a rooster named Caruso and heads out for welding rods and royal cord cable at a fair near the Capitol, plus hot dogs or “perritos” for a friend's daughter's birthday salad. She tries hitching a ride on Rancho Boyeros but walks via Ayestaran and 20 de Mayo to Centro Habana and Infanta at Santa Marta, visiting a state-run dollar store. It smells of spoiled meat; shelves hold canned mushrooms, asparagus jars, black olives, cod (one kilogram worth three months' pension), frozen salmon, but no milk, butter, eggs, sardines, cheese, vegetable oil, or hot dogs. An elderly man outside asks for something “to eat.” Hot dogs, a staple for decades in snacks, dinners, and prison visits, are now scarce. She proceeds down Carlos III to Reina Street, where under the arcades vendors display garbage-rescued items: worn wrinkled shoes, old remote controls with grease traces, half-inch plumbing elbows with mineral residue, a single right-foot woman's shoe for a teen, broken radio antenna, Italian coffee maker missing handle and funnel, 2016 calendar, and a dirty blister pack of pills. She checks La Isla de Cuba state store in Fraternity Park: empty butcher section, Spanish capers, no frozen chicken or hot dogs. Finally, at the hardware market near the Cuban Parliament, private vendors supply 10 meters of royal cord quickly: “Ask for whatever you need—we’ve got it.” She walks home along Reina, passing the vendor waving the lone shoe. This unfolds amid an energy crisis with scarce transport.