Remnants to the Wind

Remnants to the Wind / Rosa Maria Rodriguez
Posted on October 30, 2013

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

Source: "Remnants to the Wind / Rosa Maria Rodriguez | Translating Cuba"
- http://translatingcuba.com/remnants-to-the-wind/