Havana/The District Pujols-Los Chinese of Placetas, Villa Clara, where more than 11,500 people live together, is one of more extreme examples of urban precariousness in Cuba. Wealthy neighborhood and with good houses before 1959, the revolution was surrounding it with prefabricated buildings. Today two evils are characterized: the accumulation of poor families and garbage, which carpets the streets and floods the ditches.
“Pujols was the residential neighborhood par excellence of Placetas, it was the good neighborhood, with beautiful houses,” says Mauricio, who has lived step by step the debacle of the place. “The Chinese, on the other hand, was the cast built by the revolution.” The more than 60 buildings of the recent era have “swallowed” the splendor of yesteryear.
It is the battle of the “capitalist” against the “russ Cheap material and, now, very deteriorated. Almost all Cuban municipalities have a cast in these conditions – José Martí de Santa Clara is an emblematic case – that reflect the impoverishment of a large part of the country’s population.
Almost all Cuban municipalities have a cast in these conditions, which reflect the impoverishment of a large part of the country’s population.
In Pujols-Los Chinese the vice-governor of Villa Clara, Noel Chinea, dropped this weekend a disconcerting dataGiven the seriousness of the situation: Placetas had a budget of 2,747,000 pesos “destined for vulnerable neighborhoods” and only spent 1,658,000 on 12 actions.
Problems are not lacking in which to spend the money, admitted the leader, who was photographed by the local station, with his delegation, next to an overflowing landfill. Chinea visited two constituencies classified as “vulnerable” – 61 and 108–, in which there is “a lot of accumulated garbage” and other “social indisciplines.” In a meeting, hours later, he apostrophicized local officials with a “detailed economic analysis” for not giving prioritized attention to the neighborhood.
“And the lack of that money,” says Mauricio. The main problem in the area is not, unlike others, neither violence nor the consumption of chemicalbut the landfills “in every corner.”
The streets of Pujols-Chinese have a peculiarity that aggravates the situation: ten years ago the local government built new buildings and, to install a drainage, drilled the pavement and opened a thick ditch in the middle of each street. “They broke everything,” explains Mauricio, “but they never paved again.”
The ditch was covered with land after the pipe installation. The unevenness between the asphalt and the “hole,” explains Mauricio, has naturally attracted garbage. “Waste fly through the air,” he illustrates. There is no longer the one who feels on an sidewalk or goes for a walk through the cast. The puddles of masonal waters – with all kinds of waste – are in each block.
“For some reason the blissful pipe also usually gives problems and overflows,” he adds. A dense plague, which is the combination of several faithful, then surrounds the neighborhood.
“Communal services disregarded this here,” he says. “No one remembers when it was the last time they spent. And that Pujols-Chinese is not a marginal neighborhood: it used to be a good neighborhood, ”he insists. The garbage also reaches the outputs of Placetas to other neighboring municipalities, such as Cabaiguán: “On that road there is a giant landfill.”
“Communal services disregarded this here,” he says. “No one remembers when it was the last time they spent”
The streets are not the only thing affected by the carelessness of the authorities. The baseball land, which the neighbors call ball plan, has also become “a field lost by Marabú,” says Mauricio, who as a child practiced sports there with his friends. The other building in bad conditions is the “supermarket” built after 1959 and that was soon abandoned, due to lack of maintenance and products.
In Pujols-Los Chinese there was also a video room, but it has been not for a long time to project any movie. A family, several years ago, took the place and settled there with all its belongings. “Now it’s another house, poor, but a house after all.”
A few weeks ago, when Miguel Díaz-Canel-a place of Placetas-summoned the Military exercise bastionPujols-Los Chinese became ironically in the “scenario of a possible bombardment of enemy aviation.” The simulation “recreated” an environment that should not be pretended: the collapse of a neighborhood that does not need an “invasion of the enemy” to continue to fall apart.
