Used clothes, the occasional worn-out shoe, soap, a box of cigarettes or homemade sweets, everything can be found in the street stalls that proliferate every day in some neighborhoods of La Havana, especially in Monte, Reina, Carlos III and Galiano streets.

"I don't sell to get rich, sometimes I even do it to buy bread", says a handicapped woman over 70 years old who sells coquitos in the doorway of a school. "Sometimes very little is sold, other times I do better, but I can't stop doing it, because it's impossible for me to live on my pension." Now his coffee maker has broken, he has regrets, and yesterday they came selling him a 6-cup size one for 2,500 pesos. The coffee makers are sold in hard currency stores at $12.50 and are then resold by the informal sector at high prices in national currency. "But I don't have an MLC card, nor have I ever set foot in one of those stores," he laments.

Unlike the recently authorized garage sales, these commercial points are not in the doorway of a house or in the vicinity of the home of the improvised seller, but take advantage of the busiest places to place the merchandise, on a blanket on the ground, the front steps of a building or a park bench. They operate completely illegally, but their products are so precarious and worn that the police rarely reprimand them.

A pair of shoes with a broken heel, pieces of plumbing used several times, a photo frame cracked at one end, empty knobs to store liquid detergents or hand gel are part of these emergency sales that make up the highest level. under private trade on the Island. However, despite his very poor offer, the sellers manage to get some money from him.

"There is always someone who is looking for something second-hand because they cannot buy it new," a vendor who has his blanket near Plaza de Cuatro Caminos told this newspaper. "Even though they don't look as pretty or shiny, these pieces can save anyone's day if he has a leak in the house," he notes, showing off several metal pipe elbows.

As the crisis in the country deepens, products that a few years ago nobody would have thought could find a buyer appear in these improvised points. Some are true relics of a recent past where Cuban stores could find a greater number of children's toys, school supplies, home decorations and even plastic flowers.

"I sell empty perfume bottles," explains another informal vendor who occupies the entrance to a staircase on Belascoaín street in Centro Habana. "There are people who want to put a cheap cologne on a nice doorknob and I buy them from house to house, scrub them well and sell them here. Some don't last at all between taking them out and buying them from me."

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"This week I was lucky because I found good knobs thrown away in the trash in Playa and they were all of good quality and the kind that can be refilled, they were practically snatched out of my hand as soon as I started selling them", Add. The woman also offers small empty Nivea cream tins and still matchsticks for those who want to refill them. Others fill the knobs they collect from cheap colognes and sell them that way.

The Cuban government and the official press ignore these stories and the galloping inflation, one of the reasons for the proliferation of these street vendors. When an official date approaches or an important foreign visitor to the country arrives, the uniformed men clean the main avenues of the presence of these merchants, but later they return in numbers.

"Today a bag of milk costs 1,000 pesos and tomorrow it could go up to 1,200," complains a used clothing vendor on Reina street. "I never imagined that after working so many years I would have to start doing this to be able to eat, this was not the future that the Revolution offered me when I was a young man and for which I worked so hard."

No self-employment license covers these precarious merchants. The majority are elderly people, women or people who practically live on the street. When they manage to raise some money, their main expenses go to buy food at the nearest stalls. They literally sell to eat.

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