MIAMI, United States.- The Spaniard Rosa Martorell, who was recently in Cuba as a tourist and denounced on her social networks the precariousness not only of the Cuban system but also of the hotel facilities that the Havana government sells as safe tourism, spoke exclusively with CubaNet about the accident that this Friday morning took place on the island and has already claimed the lives of at least eight people.
“Many people have told me the news and it has made my hair stand on end because just two weeks ago I was there and I thought that this could have happened perfectly to me while I was in that hotel or just walking down the street,” he said in dialogue with our journalist Camila Acosta.
On the morning of this Friday, an explosion at the Hotel Saratoga, just in front of the Havana Capitol, made the facade of the building collapse and caused damage even to neighboring buildings.
Preliminary figures from the Cuban government assure that there are also 20 injured and 13 missing, and that the accident is related to a liquefied gas leak. According to information from El País, the hotel was being prepared to be reopened on the 10th. Inside the building there were only service workers.
“This explosion demonstrates the lack of resources in Cuba for both Cubans and tourists. I knew that Cuba, being a social-communist dictatorship, was not right. But I never would have thought that as a tourist and as a person who lives abroad and who travels to the island with money, it would be so difficult for me to buy things like bottled water,” said Martorell.
Your visit to Cuba
“My friend and I didn’t want to do tourism in a hotel, so we did things on our own, and so it was impossible for us to find products even with money,” he said. Martorel and her friend traveled throughout the island, and were from Viñales, Pinar del Río, Havana and Varadero, Matanzas, to Morón, Ciego de Ávila, Cienfuegos, Trinidad, Sancti Spíritus, Santiago de Cuba and Camagüey.
Rosa Martorell gained notoriety in social networks for Cubans when she published a video in which she denounced how Sancti Spíritus was distributing the milk, and the lack of hygiene of the process. Since then, the situation experienced by ordinary Cubans has been denounced.
“The more you know is by asking the people there, more than what the media can tell you. And people told me that they were worse than 10 years ago, a lot of impotence was seen. People just want to leave the country, they don’t have money, and they want to complain but they won’t let them. What I took with me is that hardly anyone agrees with the situation in the country, and that more and more young people realize what the dictatorship is doing to them, and society is waking up.”
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