Photos: Lorenzo Crespo Silveira
-Guantanamo- Hadn’t our car got a flat tire in the middle of the mountains, if the driver wasn’t desperately at the Maisi Gas station looking how to solve the problem, and if the air pump had not been out of service, we might have never known Pablo Rodriguez Garcia, who 20 years ago invented the only automatic air pump that works there at present.
Those who drive, repair or own a vehicle in the area, see him as a kind of Savior, a scientist of life, an engineer “without many studies” that alleviates the difficulties caused to tires by the stony terrain.
“Don’t pay heed to them, journalist. How can I be a genius if I am illiterate,” says the interviewee and tells us that he can only managed to graduate from sixth grade at the Farmers-workers Faculty, and then he had three more years of education at the Provincial Party School.
All his life Pablo has been a tire repair guy in the People’s Council of La Maquina town, but in 1992, since he received so many requests at odd hours to put some air to bicycles, trucks, tractors and light vehicles, he created what he calls "the robot".
"One day I sat in my backyard and gathered everything within my reach. I finished it in 15 or 20 days and it took me that long because my children and my wife threw away everything whenever I was making some progress. They thought I was crazy, and they even tried to take me to the Psychiatric Hospital in the city of Guantanamo. The only became convinced that I was sane when they saw the finished appliance. "
People have come and are surrounding us. They long to hear from the lips of this sixty-year-old man, how he created his machine without any knowledge of Physics or Mathematics, ignoring the principles of air compression .
"I used the motor of an automatic windshield wiper which, when it falls, touches a platinum sheet and activates the mechanism which opens the air valve for exactly one minute and 20 seconds. The clock is from a V8 truck, the CT is from a Soviet Krim TV, and the tank that covers is from an electricity transformer, " he explains fast, without getting into details, because according to him it is easier to" make it than telling what he did. "
His invention works 24 hours, requires no human supervision and it is activated by the weight of a light or heavy, 20 cents coin… and it could even give the change back if you put in a peso. How did he do it?, he doesn’t us. Maybe it’s his secret.
What he does tell is that the tank has a little door through which he extracts the money it collects. But no lock there?, I ask while at point where the device should have been.
"The fact is that I don’t longer use it; years ago I installed an electro magnet and with that, operating two tiny wires from my room, I can open it," he explains.
They say inventors create what did not exist before, that expand the frontiers of knowledge, to solve the problems of humanity and are driven by curiosity and imagination.
That is the way Pablo Rodriguez Garcia is, a special human being, with a creative and nonconformist spirit, one of those people who make their virtue something useful.
