From sports court to landfill in the heart of Matanzas

Matanzas/From his classroom at Abraham Lincoln primary school, the teacher observes the deteriorated basketball court on the other side of the narrow street. Amaury cannot count his adolescence without evoking that space where he met with his friends and that today is full of weeds. “Not only did we played boys from the Simpson neighborhood, people came from the Navy and formed tremendous tournaments,” he recalls, evoking those afternoons in which he asked his father for a little black or red paint to retouch the board.

“Nobody from Inder [Instituto Nacional de Deportes] He took care of fixing the hoop or marking the pitch. We did it ourselves because of the desire to have a good time. ”

The court rose in the courtyard of an old Catholic school intervened by the Government in the early 60s. The building was then transformed into private homes, but the board set to the cement base resisted at the same time. “When I played there were still remains of a mesh fence that, to some extent, protected the adjacent perimeter with the 2 de Mayo street, but over the years they took to the tubes that served as posts,” he tells 14ymedio Amaury, convinced that the land is already unrecoverable. “Although the floor was rustic, it could be dribbled with the ball. Today the weed goes from end to end as an unfortunate winner.”

The teacher recalls that until a few years ago Abraham Lincoln students conducted their physical education classes on that neighboring court. “They had a good space to exercise, in addition to being instilled in them for basketball. That lasted until the grass covered half of the terrain and the parents complained, rightly.”

Now, children do their practices in the school patio, without minimal conditions. “Education managers did not care that the sports area was lost. It is not that I is encaled in that matter, but why is a space that can be useful?” Asks the teacher, who also points out the mountains of garbage that have accumulated in space.

Today, the smell of the decomposition of waste under the sun marks the surroundings of what was a busy court. Without trucks or collecting deposits, the neighbors leave the waste in nylon jabs or throw them without wrapping on the sidewalk. “It is certainly a social indiscipline, but what else can we do if communal cars do not pass through here,” justifies a block and a half resident of the place. “It is a pity that this area is also used as a public bath.”

The closeness of the landfill to school increases the risk of infections between students and teachers. “The complaint is no longer why they let the basketball court destroy. He assures that claims before popular power have been constant, but “all our efforts have fallen into a broken bag. After all, the relatives of the leaders are not in this school.”

There is also another latent danger: the cement base holding the board. “It’s loose. If you fall to someone for a fatality, you can even kill it,” Alexis warns. “I have told my son not to go on that sidewalk, traveled daily by many children and adults. I think that the most convenient would be to dismantle how little he is left of the court. It is preferable to keep the good memory of the past rather than keep an unfortunate incident in memory.”

The concern is not excessive. Recently, in the city of Matanzas, Michel Alejandro Cruz Aguiar died, 16, because a goal of the Aurelio Janet Athenaeum He fell on him after detaching himself. At the time of the accident, Michelin, as was known in the neighborhood of Cruz Aguiar, participated in a football game when the metal goal came off on him. “The tube that fell on him weighed a lot, when the other players went to help him passed a lot of work to remove the iron from him, they took him from the field still alive but arrived dead to the polyclinic Carlos Verdugo Martínez,” a neighbor told this newspaper.

The accident revived the claims of the Matanceros, worried because “to that sports field many teenagers and children to practice.” “That Athenaeum should not have opened its doors again, because it is a danger,” insisted the neighbor in allusion to the alleged remodeling that the center lived in 2021 after 12 years before, in 2009, the collapse of the cover of the versatile room left several injured and forces to close its doors.