Into the blackout
By Manuel Alberto Ramy and Aurelio Pedroso
HAVANA – Between the two news items we posted last night (the first at 9:05 p.m., the second at 11:18 p.m.) reporting on the blackout that affected western Cuba, some of us Progreso Weekly staffers went for a stroll in Havana. What did we see?
Our first encounter with darkness was noisy. “El apagón, gon, gon,” sang a few young men, turning the Spanish word for “blackout” into an improvised conga while soothing their throats with cheap rum. We were in Trillo Park, in the heart of the Cayo Hueso district.
“How can we NOT have music, when this is the barrio where Los Zafiros hung out,” said one conga singer. Los Zafiros is a famous musical quartet.
Only the lights of cars on the streets, portable lamps and “chismosas” (kerosene or oil lanterns) flickering in hallways and balconies broke the darkness of a city without electricity.
“Let’s water the bones,” we heard someone say, so we walked toward a rickety wooden table on a sidewalk. Around it, four men played dominoes by the light of a lamp.
“We need to drink up because it appears the blackout will last a while,” said the only man wearing a short-sleeved shirt. The others were barechested because of the heat.
Hearing that we were from the foreign media, a woman invited us from her balcony to visit her apartment and told us that, “while watching the NTV [national TV newscast], the light went out.” As she flicked a hand fan, she said: “Don’t worry; everything here goes out and returns,” and then complained that “today, the soap disappears, or the detergent, or the throw rugs, and tomorrow or the day after tomorrow they reappear.”
“Would you like to see everything, everything reappear?” we asked. It was a trick question, but Cubans are no fools and everyone caught our drift.
“No, son. What I don’t like is the ‘today, yes; tomorrow, no.’ I want my money to last me longer, I want things to work the way they were intended to, not at the whim of those whatchamacall’ems?” “Bureaucrats,” Aurelio chimes in.
“And I want things to be done as promised because vacillatin’ may be good for having fun but for other things, nix, as they say.”
Pleasant, jolly, Gloria (Yoya) is a 50-some native who exudes generosity and wields a sharp tongue. She prepares coffee for us in a tin can that she heats on an alcohol burner “invented by my son-in-law.”
Apparently alluding to Cuba’s socialist system, she says: “Nobody is going to knock this down, but we have to fix it fast because we have only one life to live and this one is all bollixed up.” She smiles sarcastically and alludes to some nostalgic émigrés: “Yet there are some who want to come back.”
“I am Cuban and not a counter-revolutionary, but we have to solve our problems, otherwise we’ll go down the tubes and others will come to take over.” She stresses “others” the way I stressed “everything” earlier.
Havana without power, in a total blackout. The same happens in Matanzas, Santa Clara, Cienfuegos and part of Camagüey. Millions of people united by darkness talk about their lives and the national reality. They criticize the measures taken, the lack of agility and light a candle, perhaps one left over from the Day of Cachita, the Virgin of Charity, patron saint of all Cubans.
The candle solves the problem of the moment and also represents a search for hope, that wonderful quality of the Cuban people.
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