From our Bureau of Socialist Public Fountains with some assistance from our Bureau of Apartheid Hydraulics
Add this to the list of the Revolutions many “achievements”: water is so scarce in Cuba that public fountains have been shut off. In Havana, which has more fountains than any other city on the island (the vast majority built B.C.: before Castro) , this is more painfully evident.
Browse through the slide show above. Compare the city’s dry fountains with those at apartheid hotels (3 photos at end of slide show).
Loosely translated from CubaNet
Days of sweltering heat and clouds of dust from the Sahara closing the skies, as if to make the Island the desert it has resembled for years. Food is lacking, buildings languish and extinguish in ruins and dust, just like those who inhabit them, while water becomes a miracle for many who do not have it but see it from afar or in the most cruel proximity, in the infinity pools of the hotels empty of tourists, in the little bottles of free cold water at the tables where the leaders of the Communist Party meet.
In Cuba, water is a privilege, and it is not for everyone. And in Havana, regardless of whether it is the capital, the situation is not very different from the rest of the country. That’s what all its dry sources talk about: the one on Calle 23 and Malecón, always a mess of rot, despite —or perhaps very deliberately— the “Cuba” sign that it displays on top; that of Maceo Park; that of La India, in front of the Capitol, luckily safe from the explosion of the Saratoga Hotel; that of Cuatro Caminos, which should be a relief for those who spend the night in the surroundings, especially in the so-called “Parque de la Chispa”, because of the drunks that gather there (or because of the beggars that some want to pass off as drunk).
The Cuatro Caminos fountain, its closest environment, today is a busy “candonga” where, in the absence of water, people sell what they find in the garbage, and that is an image that could well portray the true state of our situation. economic, as a reflection of the head and tail that is the policy of the Communist Party.
And like those mentioned, almost all the other fountains, just as dry and surrounded by misery, have not fulfilled their function of beautifying the environment or relieving the thirst of the walker for years, either because of a damaged pipe back in the 90s, or because of ” Public Health provisions” to put an end to mosquito breeding sites, either because, according to what we have been told, some “enthusiast” branded them wasteful or made them responsible for blame and abandonment that belongs to others.
The truth is that someone once gave the order to dry them, especially where they are most accessible and necessary. In the poorest neighborhoods where, in the absence of running water, ventilated houses, money and transport to go to the beaches, they could be turned into public bathtubs and thus, with the “ugly spectacle” the misery revealed in a much more grotesque way than It’s getting harder to hide every day.
Continue reading HERE in Spanish