I found the body of a dead dog like a decal on the floor of the intersection of the streets Amado and Goss, in Vibora, and twenty meters closer to Mayia Rodriguez, a bird also laminated in the asphalt. That image filled my retina in the block of the Monaco market.
So daily deteriorates the hygiene in any Havana neighborhood for ordinary Cubans. There where the animal died — it does not matter if run over by a car or illness — his entrails were left in the sun for the decay to infect the environs and pollute the olfactory space of the passersby.
What’s worse is the level of contamination to which those who habitually pass through there — among them many children — are exposed and the possible breeding ground for transmission of sicknesses and the risk of contagion for other vagabond dogs and hungry scavenging animals that poke at or feed on the hound’s remains.
Cuba has become — also — a dump or open cemetery for unburied animals and it seems to matter to no one. These kinds of situations should not happen, but now that they do, to whom to write or direct oneself? It is possible that we get a faceless, nameless replica of an entity and although you have it, it does not fill the void of decades of helplessness, indolence and filth.
The most regrettable thing is that the answers almost always remain on paper, in the article and personal interest of a journalist, in a public complaint and nothing more. When will we overcome the stage of explanations and confront problems with facts and concrete solutions?
The remedy would not be — as the authorities are accustomed to doing — to create more entities to attend to social matters and needs accumulated for decades, but they should de-bureaucratize the agencies or firms and give them the resources and powers to quickly and satisfactorily solve these kinds of issues that confront the people and that the State does not solve.
I would like to see the surroundings of the residences, markets and commercial centers that the head honchos, their relatives, their friends and high military chiefs frequent. I wonder if there are stray dogs in those areas. Possibly not, to avoid fecal waste, disagreeable odors and the running over of one of those animals. But if something were to go astray, have an accident or perish in one of those places, surely it would be duly and diligently “transferred” in order to receive “rapid” burial or cremation.
Logic works expeditiously for sectors from “above” like a horizontal and vertical elevator which, although it seems to be, is not stuck but really designed not to go further down from a certain level.
Translated by mlk
29 October 2013
