LAS TUNAS, Cuba. — “I didn’t call you because you were going to tell me I’m crazy, but something just happened that shook our bed and the window, not once, but twice. I thought it was Futo, but I looked and the dog wasn’t there, and it wasn’t explosions from the guards (at the shooting range). That had to be an earth tremor and a big one to shake this house”, my wife told me this morning at dawn, who, already ready to run out of the tomb that our home could become, hastily, on her dressing gown sleeping, she had put on a dress.
Since our house is a heavy two-story construction of blocks, bricks, and reinforced concrete—hurricane-proof, but not earthquake-proof—and I was still half-drowsy, exhausted after two days of work planting trees in the mountains, I looked to my wife and I just managed to say, “well, the news will come out”.
I was in the bathroom when Maggie came in with “the news,” telling me she couldn’t get to the local station. There were also no comments from neighbors and no one on the street said anything about it. In Las Tunas, 52 kilometers from Puerto Padre, none of his relatives had felt the shaking.
“They didn’t feel them and you were tired and still sound asleep, but I did feel them, strong. Radio Victoria (the provincial station) was talking about it right now when the radio went dead, and look, the news is here,” said Maggie, showing me her phone, where, via the internet, an expert with a foreign accent was explaining how and why they had Those shocks occurred that startled her, warning about the dangers that Cuba and other Caribbean islands face due to a potential earthquake.
What will happen in Cuba if there is an earthquake like the one that destroyed Haiti? What will we do with the wounded having medical services without medicine? Where will we bury the dead with the cemeteries already without capacity? How to rebuild the houses that have taken a lifetime to build?
while a earthquake shook the north coast of Las Tunas this morning, another shake, paradoxically rooted in immobility, that of the statism of the totalitarian regime, keeps Cubans in a constant hustle and bustle, without stopping, in the agitation that subsistence entails, the precarious daily life in this country, where one day there is no bread because there is no flour, another because the bakery is broken, and another and another because there is no electricity.
In Cuba there is no bread, there is no milk, there is no coffee, there is no water, there are no public services that deserve to be called governmental in a permissive nation of despotism and nepotism, that is to say, in a lazy nation. And, yes, I wonder what will happen if, to top off our misfortunes, now an earthquake deepens the crater that Castro-communism has already made in more than 60 years of dictatorship.
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