Petroleum

Water in a basket

Petroleum

By Dalia Céspedes

HAVANA – Everyday as I LEAVE I think of you, when I find those two empty cans, one green, one red, lying on the lawn. I think of you, petroleum, for I’m sure that those two cans, one of beer and one of cola, wouldn’t be there on the park grass, were it not for you.

I don’t blame the individual’s hand, for I know that hand is at your service; human beings, contrary to what is commonly believed, are an instrument of technology. One calls instrument, in this case, that which is blindly put at the disposal of a specific end. That human couple, as inseparable as the ying and yang, drinking together and leaving together their traces on the dew-wet soil, is submitted to your will, goes up and down according to your price, with your energy moves forward or stops, sees with your light and without it is totally blind.

I think of your name, petroleum – stone oil? How many trillions of instants, equivalent to the gesture of throwing a beer can on the lawn, have passed in order to have you be what you are, to let us be what we are? I think of the tree that the silly person sees sometimes as nothing but a cellulose container, or a post to uphold your vain yet overwhelming supremacy. The tree no longer has a life of its own, it’s just a compressed living room, several hundreds pages of a newspaper always repeating itself.

Because nothing in nature, not even the human being, exists for itself, for its own value and joy of existing. Everything, with no exceptions, must have a utility and a price. And would it be superficial to say that such utility and price are somehow in agreement with you? Are you the enemy, petroleum? Are you the true god, the incarnated in the entrails of the earth, and scattered through valleys, seas and heavens? Neither. You used to be stone oil. Who knows which other functions nature had in mind when it created you, functions that we will never manage to comprehend before your total exhaustion.

What is then the future of the island of Cuba as an oil producing country? I’m not worried, as many analysts are, about what our northern neighbor will think, but what will the environmental behavior be of the homo cubano. If somebody thinks, no matter how analytical of Cuban-American relations he might just be, that oil resources are going to work as a foothold in an eternity of misunderstandings between those two nations, then tell him or her to ask Saddam Hussein or Ghaddafi how useful petroleum was in negotiations, or even for survival, or even to buy a decent death or an indecent peace. Nonsense!

New income sources, that’s all they’re sniffing around for. New income, and for what? To increase consumption. And, what’s the use of consumption? Well, to increase income; what a silly question! Is there any other meaning in this kind of existence? They could say I’m offering arguments to those against the autonomous progress and rightful prosperity of the island of Cuba. So many things, during so many years, we have silenced thanks to the dispute based on the argument offered to the enemy that our constrained silence appears to be plain ignorance rather than discretion.

More substantial seems to me the fact that the average Cuban citizen, especially in the capital, goes around with a beer or cola can in hand and even if surrounded by garbage bins he/she almost inevitably throws the can on the street, or hurls it to the sea or pitches it through the bus or auto window. And if she/he is on the balcony, why not graciously let it fly down? The habit of throwing cans around, I must be clear, is just an instance of a general attitude and not a solitary act of naughtiness.

We must believe, of course, that in matters of oil exploitation, this average citizen will transform into a conscious, environmentally minded individual. We must believe it is so because we decided to accept as true that the presence of petroleum in the island and its surrounding waters is a fine gift from Mother Nature. As to both beliefs, I have my doubts.

When those who deliver everywhere and anywhere their solid or sonorous wastes, grab the reins of oil exploitation in Cuba, we will be in need of the Holy Virgin’s compassion. Not so that we may further prosper, but to be rescued, once more, from murky waters.

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