Luis Mario is 22 years old and is dedicated to caring for pigeons in the Bacuranao neighborhood, an area in Eastern Havana where dark water has rained several times since last Sunday, affecting plants and animals. “I have had to keep the pigeons and not let them fly because on Monday they came back with spots of a sticky substance on their wings,” he tells 14ymedio.
“The animals are very nervous and we are only giving them the water that we already had collected before the fire started, because we are afraid that they are going to get sick,” he warns. The residents of that area of the north coast regret that they have not received more official information on “how to act in the face of what is falling from the sky.”
“The family doctor came asking if anyone had dengue fever, but when we asked her if there was a health risk with these dark clouds and rain, she told us that Citma [Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología y Medio Ambiente] I had already assured that they did not offer danger, but my throat tells me something else and my pigeons too”.
In the other direction, to the west, residents in the vicinity of the Mariel port are also concerned. “Right now we are under some very strange clouds and since the morning there is a strong smell of fuel in the air. I have not let the children go out to play in the yard because I don’t know if this can make them sick,” Belinda comments by telephone to this newspaper. Ruiz, resident in the urban area of Mariel.
“People are kept at home and avoid going out but the queues do not clear”
“Since this is an industrial port, it is normal that from time to time there are odors of this type, but I have never felt them so strong and the irritation in the eyes is very annoying,” he details. “People are kept at home and avoid going out, but the queues don’t clear up. Yesterday a tremendous downpour fell on me while I was waiting to buy bread. I put on a long-sleeved blouse but I had to go out.”
“The animals no longer want to eat the grass,” lamented, for his part, a resident of the municipality of San Adrián, Mayabeque, right on the border with the province of Matanzas, where the gigantic fuel tanks of the Super Tanker Base.
“The animals don’t want to eat the grass anymore…”
The environmental impact is already evident. A resident of San Adrián tells me what is happening in that area #Massacres pic.twitter.com/MpRQPCBJze
– Miriel Santana (@SantanaMiriel) August 9, 2022
In a video he made from his home in Matanzas, filmmaker Miriel Santana explains that a downpour fell on Monday that blackened the land and the wells. “We have nowhere to give the animals water, the rivers are polluted with black,” as is the clothes on the line.
On the same Monday, the newspaper Giron public a chronicle that details how the rain that has fallen since the weekend “does not turn the fields green” as a result of the enormous fire.
In that note, the provincial newspaper collects the testimony of a farmer from the fertile Yumurí valley, Diosdado Vera, who declared that he does not give his animals water for fear that they will be poisoned and die.
The daughter of the peasant himself laments in that report, “the stains cannot be removed” from clothing soiled by acid rain.
Barely the next day After the start of the incident, as a result of the impact of lightning according to the official version, the Minister of Science, Technology and Environment, Elba Rosa Pérez Montoya, warned of the existence of a cloud of contamination with particles that contained substances such as carbon dioxide sulfur, nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide, highly harmful to the environment.
Clothes soiled by acid rain “do not remove stains”
Inhabitants not only of Matanzas, but of Mayabeque and even Havana, witnessed the traces of the black rain during the weekend and on Monday.
Although they have recommended keeping masks on the street and sheltering “vulnerable people”, both the authorities and the doctors asked by this newspaper assure that there has been no increase in respiratory pathologies.
In any case, the official press recognizes that the risk of acid rain will persist as long as the flames are not completely extinguished.
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