Aramirta Castan arranges the flowers she bought this Tuesday in her centerpiece. “I spent a fortune but, although things are that bad, I still bought my bouquet because every year I spend the 31st with flowers at my house and this is not going to be different,” he says.
While she speaks, you can feel the noise and vibrations of the blows caused by a brigade in charge of demolishing the remains of the neighboring building that collapsed on December 16 and killed a passerby on Monte Street.
The rubble of the works falls on the street and on the sidewalk while the neighbors pass; the jackhammer makes the entire building rumble and, like any house in the area, everything seems about to collapse. “Here in my dining room the pieces of the ceiling are falling, everything is shaking, it seems that we are in an earthquake,” laments this 77-year-old woman, thin as a bird. “That portal out there is in the air, this is all falling down.”
Castan lives with his dog on the second floor of 429 Monte Street. He has three children, but of them only one daughter lives in Cuba; the two men left the country. On the table, next to the flowers, there is a casserole with guava jam and on the kitchen plate another with casquitos.
“By this time I always make dinner and sweets, but this year I can’t prepare flan or rice pudding because nothing is achieved; dinner, even less, I have not been in the mood for anything,” says Castan while packing his sweets in pots glass that has previously been carefully cleaned with boiling water.
The day after the collapse, he spent hours in the neighborhood pharmacy waiting for them to finish knocking down some of the walls that had been saved. She does not forget that later the architect visited her, who went to make the opinion of her house and told her that, as she was the owner, all the repair was on her own, because, she explained, “they had nothing to do with it. with that unless it’s a total collapse. “
She assures that at the time when she was self-employed in the Plaza de la Catedral she spent “a lot of money” fixing her house, but insists that at this time something like this is impossible for her to carry out.
“The architect says that I can ask for a loan, but that in the same way is money that I have to return and I do not have that possibility, not to mention that the house is large and it is not four pesos that are needed to fix it,” he says Castan. “What I have is my husband’s pension, which is 1,639 pesos. I don’t have retirement because I was a nurse and I stopped working from one day to the next to go on my own.”
She points out that her co-workers criticized her a lot at that time for that decision but that “she had no alternative” because “the salary in Public Health was a pittance.”
Castan has lived in that house since 1980 and his children grew up there. As she explains, that house “has been in collapse” for years and the building “has been declared uninhabitable” long before she moved into that property.
Before that she lived rented with her husband in various places in the same area and she remembers once when she was taking a bath and her husband yelling at her: “Aramirta, don’t come out, don’t go out of the bathroom.” She wondered why those screams, if she hadn’t even finished showering, until she peeked out the door and realized there was nothing in front of her feet.
“Everything had collapsed and I didn’t even realize it,” he recalls. “I was able to go out because my husband and other neighbors put up some boards and I was able to walk on the void.”
In the lower Castan lives Miguel Alejandro Alderete with his mother and brothers. The man explains that now they are demolishing “what was left in poor condition” but that “nobody knows anything about the fate of his house.” As he told this Tuesday to 14ymedio, a week ago he went to the Housing offices to ask about the situation of his property but they told him that they do not serve any person until next month. “In January without fail I go to the government,” he said.
Standing on a scaffold, the young people who drill the old architraves with the pneumatic hammer that have been practically hanging in the air at the corner of Monte and Ángeles confirm the order they have been given. At a time when they pause for a short rest they specify: “Our thing is to demolish what is in bad condition, it was the order they gave us now, but it is always like that. They send us to the places when the collapse has already occurred or there is a dead man. “
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