Last Wednesday, a reporter from 14ymedio sent a photo that he had just taken on Avenida del Puerto, in Havana: a camel he picked up passengers on a route that took him to La Palma, a neighborhood on the outskirts. It was further proof that fuel shortages were creating a transport crisis similar to the one experienced in the 1990s, during the Special Period, and which began even before the end of the Soviet subsidy.
In 1988, Cuban engineer Jorge Hernández Fonseca and his colleagues from the National Office of Industrial Design proposed to the authorities an idea to end the transportation crisis in Havana. The locally made vehicle would have the capacity to carry more than 300 people on each trip. A few years later, the “invention” had become the symbol of an entire era of survival and there was no bus stop where people did not wait, often desperately, for its arrival.
“The idea was for the Island to have a kind of ‘metro’ over the streets,” he tells 14ymedio Hernández Fonseca, exiled in Miami. The “inventor of camel” qualifies as “cyclical” the collapse of public transport in the capital and in the main cities of the Island since the triumph of the Revolution. The return of the “metrobús” that was never such, but two or three buses assembled with a trailer on an 18-wheel chassis and two “humps” on the roof, it’s no surprise.
The “inventor of the camel” describes as “cyclical” the collapse of public transport in the capital and in the main cities of the Island since the triumph of the Revolution
“I think it is the most sensible thing to quickly alleviate the crisis,” says the engineer, although he doubts that the country is in a position to manufacture new buses with the characteristics that the old ones had. camels. Those that circulated during the Special Period were made by “cargo transportation companies and the Army.” In addition, he claims, it had the ability to save fuel due to the large number of passengers it could pick up in a single trip.
Hernández Fonseca, who had traveled to various world capitals, understood that in Cuba in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was no way to sustain an underground transportation network. A bus with certain characteristics traced from the meters was the only option. “Everyone who has used a metro knows that the factor of mass transport takes precedence over comfort. We must remember the context in which the first metrobuses appeared: the Special Period”.
The fuel crisis that the island is experiencing now, he reflects, is a “repetition” of that time. Many Cubans, however, believed that they had passed the time when the camels they were the only option to get to the workplace or move around the city. Today, the few who circulate through Havana – as “rented”, according to the sign they wear – bring with them the bad taste of the economic debacle of the 1990s.
The criticisms of camel They are not only aimed at the bad memories that it brings back to most Cubans by associating it with the crisis, but also how hot its interior is given the many passengers it carries and the small windows it has. The jolts that it causes in the houses located in the avenues through which it circulates also add to its defects.
“Cubans have more criticism than praise about the camel“, admits Hernández Fonseca, who affirms that he is not oblivious to the discomfort of the vehicle, but it must be understood that “there was no other alternative” at that time, he says. As the situation is, he does not consider that it is a thing of the past nor does he see it forming part of a future Cuban transport museum.
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