The tree doesn’t even have any pine needles left, and its emaciated trunk is underpinned and is all patched up
14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 14 October 2024 – The pine tree installed for Christmas 2022 on Calle Galiano in central Havana remains in its place. It bears little resemblance, however, to the tree full of lights which was intended to cheer up the capital’s citizens during that Christmas period.
Never very bushy even when it was a young tree, it didn’t even live for very long either. Tree months after being installed, the pine, the first public Christmas decoration that Cubans had seen in six decades, already had branches that were turning brown due to its being a perennial variety. Now it doesn’t even have any needles left at all, and its emaciated trunk is underpinned and all patched up.
The tree formed part – they said at the time – of an “encompassing initiative” of the Avenida Italia project in which the European country intended to show its gratitude for the presence of Cuban doctors in a number of their cities during the pandemic.
“Look at it, you can barely see it at all, it’s as skinny as we are”, commented an elderly lady sarcastically
It wasn’t, then, a Christmas symbol after all, but a very socialist “Tree of Friendship”, as it was rechristened in the Cuban press.
Just like in the lyrics of the Spanish song La Puerta de Alcalá, which was popular in Cuba, the tree sees the time pass, but, unlike the Victor Manuel and Ana Belén version, it does so all for the worse.
“Look at it, you can barely see it at all, it’s as skinny as we are”, an elderly lady commented with sarcasm on Monday as she sat in the Fe del Valle park. “I don’t know why they don’t remove it. I look at it and I think about the Christmas that awaits us all. The earth here is poisoned”.
Translated by Ricardo Recluso
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