He reached the transit community Carbo Servia on February 12th for six months, some days more, some three weeks, and five, 16, 18 years. Six months Luisa should be housed, while they will provide her a home for herself and her family. 18 years is the time she has waited, suddenly, one morning. 18 years out of which 12 she has carried a bucket of water dripping from the underside up to the second floor. She came with her three-year-old daughter and already has two grandchildren and one newborn. She was 34 when she arrived and now is 52 and still waiting.
She passed from 34 years to the 52 lost in the provisional, much more than a temporary condition: it is, above all, a state of mind. In the transit they do not provide a specific projection from reality, not grown from solid ground because it is suspended, this loses its limits by perennial permanence at an impasse, in the middle of something, in an ephemeral contradictory constant. The time does not advance into the future, but piles up on itself, in another dimension, but not progressive upward.
She is housed in one of four buildings (identified from A to D) where she has been sharing space and fate with other 779 people. All within the area comprising two Soviet-built schools, leaks, a medical station and local vacuum enabled for the sector chief, a winery, a pharmacy, a liquid gas selling point, a cafeteria, a deep ditch that was opened more than six months to lay pipes that have not arrived and it does not matter if they come, that they clog it, you have to cross daily and accidents have already occurred, an esplanade clean now because Communal Services cleaned it two or three days ago. “They came now because there is a visit. An act of culture takes place every 20 years. Yesterday they turned on the lights just because Silvio Rodriguez is coming”.
“I, as a delegate, tried to manage it with all agencies for more than five months and no one could, and yesterday, in less than four hours, the Utility Company lit the street and the hostel. So, yes you could, “says Roberto, also housed here for nearly 20 years ago, and his neighbors, who elected him, support him and listen and share.”When the delegate is speaking, the administration says it is a gossip or a liar. They have taken it up on him up for the truths he has said. “
Roberto, surveyor and internationalist, plays fair: “The Municipal Party has been here, what happens is that this has been in the hands of indolent organisms. This is the responsibility of the Municipal and Provincial Shelter, but no one cares for the sheltered ones”.
Carbo Servia is about 15 kilometers from Wajay. It is its nearest “center” where housed should stock up on basic necessities, medical care and education above the high school level. They are isolated. “This place is thrown into oblivion, it’s like a place that no one remembers and is left abandoned. No one comes here rather than inspectors fining people between 500 and 1,500 pesos for having a pig”. On Sunday they were there for the first time, artists with music: “At least a distraction, because here there is nothing.”
They know when they arrived, but they don’t even manage to guess when they will leave, if ever. “People have left here only when they get a terminal disease,” a girl says.
On February 12, 2014 Luisa turns 19 in Carbo Servia, sheltered. “I came for six months and I have been here 18 years”, then breaks into a laugh that is not joy, but something of melancholy disguise, a melancholy that can only be laughter. “They say, they say, hope is the last to die. We can not do anything else. “
(Cubadebate)
Author
Mónica Rivero
