Parolin: An Inferno Within the Dream City
HAVANA TIMES – When I accepted my current job, I didn’t know the area where it was located. “Be careful, because there’s a favela there,” they told me, but I persisted anyway.
The idea I had of a favela was very different from what I’ve seen here in Curitiba. I had it preconceived as a chaotic space, lacking urban order, narrow and miserable, where simply entering would mean being robbed or killed.
At least that’s what I had seen in the movies.
Parolin is a normal neighborhood, just quite dirty, full of graffiti, with very poor people, but it also has expensive houses and businesses. Only that, in general, it’s controlled by drug traffickers.
Every now and then, on my way to work, I hear about someone’s death over drug debts or for getting caught stealing —something the “bosses” don’t tolerate in this neighborhood.
When I’m on my way to the supermarket along Henry Ford Street, I see many homeless people, smoking or injecting themselves, and I also see well-dressed young people going to that place to enter the world of drugs.
Parolin also has an even more painful area, where people who make a living by recycling garbage gather to sell what they’ve collected. Recently, I passed through there and was stunned.
It was noon, and the sun was as strong as in Cuba. That part of the neighborhood looked like a massive dump in the middle of a residential area. Everything was dirty and burned. Many marginalized people were shouting at each other.
There were many of those huge sacks where they gather aluminum or cardboard. Now and then, I saw signs that expressed the spirit of that place: “Pain gives meaning to my garage,” or “I only want what’s mine, peace.”
A woman passed by me on a bicycle, her age impossible to identify. I swear she could have been either a teenager or a mature woman.
Since that day, I haven’t stopped thinking about human nature. About how a place like that can exist in the middle of a model city like Curitiba. I think a lot about people’s hearts and about my own.