14ymedio, Pedro Espinosa, Havana, 31 March 2024 — Without changing his tone of voice, an official of the government of Havana explained this Thursday to Joaquín, a 68-year-old retiree, why the neighborhood of Santa Fe, in Guanabacoa, had not received water for more than ten days. “The reservoirs are dry,” he said before hanging up the phone. With that data – and trying not to lose his temper – the old man went to the Communist Party, the municipal delegate and the leaders of his area. He received more laziness and a piece of advice: “Don’t go anywhere else.”
A “comrade” of the Communist Party at least was sincere, Joaquín tells 14ymedio. “I’m a militant but I’m not going to deceive you,” she confessed. “What am I going to tell you? One more lie? This has no solution. It’s disrespectful, because even if the reservoirs are dry, they should send pipas.”
The dry streets of Santa Fe, the discomfort of his family and the economic desperation in the face of the economic crisis of the Island have caused, as Joaquín defines it, the problems of the neighborhood to be “a chain.” The leaders, he believes, are mere “smoke-screens,” whose function is to kick the ball down the road and dodge anyone who asks for explanations. “That’s how they stay clean themselves,” he says, alluding to the Government and pointing his finger at the ceiling.
The restoration of the service – after Joaquín called Havana – was short-lived: “First thing in the morning this Friday they had already removed it,” he says. Another palliative measure – this Wednesday – was to send a pipa, but without a hose. In front of the impoverished Hino truck, rusty and decorated with a red ribbon “against the evil eye,” the neighbors gathered in a show that Joaquín found regrettable.
“Old men carrying water, one pipa for the whole block… it’s abusive,” he says. “People are drinking water even from puddles. They are not bathing because not everyone has a cistern. But, today, who can build a cistern? One bag of cement costs 4,000 pesos on the street and 7,000 privately, and the aggregate costs 3,500.”
It doesn’t seem bad to him that, whoever can, pays for a private pipa. What he does not conceive is that the poor people of Santa Fe, who have been complaining about the difficulties in the supply for years, are sent a pipa by the authorities like this Wednesday’s. “If
