Havana Cuba. — It rained like we hadn’t seen it rain in a long time in western Cuba and although some are happy because it has been a relief after so many months of drought, others still tremble or cry because of the misfortunes that always accompany so much humidity, more so in a city like The Havana that is falling apart and that, it seems, was doomed to suffer, sunk in the midst of the worst left by fire and excessive water.
A few weeks ago, the explosion of the Saratoga hotel not only brought us more mourning and sorrow, but also intensified the trauma, always lurking, of the real possibility of dying violently and suddenly, as happened with the three girls from Old Havana who were playing when the collapse of a balcony ended their lives.
As inhabitants of a deteriorated city, with decades of abandonment and neglect —where as a consequence dangers lie in wait for us even inside our homes and where spending money on regular maintenance of our home would mean stopping (badly) eating and (badly) dressing —, this new misfortune that is the torrential rains, for many Cubans there is no other way to interpret it than as a kind of punishment for something they have been doing wrong, and conscientiously.
Sometimes between laments, sometimes between laughs, I have heard these days, everywhere, about this guilt that apparently weighs on us, and there have been those who have come out to make their promises and spells to end once and for all adversities or, at least, to try to escape unscathed from that “national evil” that, due to its recurrence and intensity, seems more than just jettatura.
A “magical” supernatural interpretation of so many misfortunes arriving in droves and more so when the latter happens around such a “special” day for the dictatorship as Raúl Castro’s 91st birthday.
Enough to conclude that, from before the tornado until now, they have all been “signs.” This is how someone jokingly told me, despite his fear of losing his home because of the waters. And signs, he tells me, not only that possibly one or several jettators govern us, but also that a long time ago we have crossed the limits of fatal resignation, of those fears so similar to indifference, that they do not allow us to evolve. as a country.
We are a people with deep magical roots that cannot avoid such associations between one thing and the other, just as we cannot help noticing that too much “osogbo” punishes us precisely in the days of rigged judicial processes and unjust sentences against young people and children; and precisely when so much “national apathy”, so much silence, we launched against the musician Maykel Osorbo and his friend, the also artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara.
And yes, it is absurd to think something like that when we know that torrential rains, tornadoes, explosions occur all over the world, every day, but it happens that not only in our idiosyncrasy are we as absurd as we are superstitious, but when something as sinister happens here, in a country where almost everything goes from bad to worse, and where most people do not find a minimum of comfort and freedom to exist, then we are invaded by that irrational feeling of being cursed, condemned to spin in an infinite vortex of calamities from which it is almost impossible to escape.
Because when it seemed that we had hit rock bottom after tornadoes, pandemics, lockdowns, repressions, blackouts, hunger, inflation, fires and explosions, heavy rains have come to show us that we are still descending in free fall and that we probably will be for a while longer ( perhaps even crashing against the bottom of the abyss) because, only in matters of bad weather, now in June is when the cyclonic season has just begun and there are already about 800 houses affected, despite the fact that this time it was only water, not accompanied by hurricane winds. And what begins badly, we already know the end.
Even without having cleared, the displacement of families and the collapses in houses already add up to several hundred just in the center of the capital, and now when in a few days the sun does its thing, without a doubt we will know of other hundreds of houses damaged, lost , unrecoverable, in a country where having your own roof, even if it is about to collapse, is a blessing and even a miracle.
Today there are tens of thousands of Cubans who have waited for years in unhealthy shelters or at the expense of friends or relatives, for the miracle that the regime ever remembers that someone exists on this island besides foreigners with tickets, military and senior leaders, the only “trinity” with the certainty that, at some point, sooner rather than later, they will obtain and enjoy that property erected with much more than four walls, and “without their own effort”, just by virtue of their caste privileges.
It is not mandatory to refer to any statistics. It is enough to observe our environment to realize how sad and complex is the matter of the state of conservation of the housing fund in Cuba, as well as how great is the probability that any of us, whether or not we live in one of the many ruined houses that make up our daily landscape, could end up crushed under one of those landslides that are about to happen, tomorrow or in the coming months, as a late effect of the rains that fell but, also, due to the persistence of abandonment, of the bungling, as well as by the macabre plans of a regime that, few will know for what obscure reasons, insists on prioritizing the construction of hotels and that, consequently, in each collapse does not identify a tragedy, but rather another plot for the next “Portfolio of opportunities”.
OPINION ARTICLE
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