Hide, the Garbage Is Coming!

By Eduardo N. Cordovi

HAVANA TIMES – A cheerful Cha Cha Cha tune called La basura (The garbage) enjoyed immense popularity in Cuba during the fifties and early sixties. Its jocular refrain advocates fleeing the garbage man when the bells announce his approach, because he “carries away everything worthless.” The song, composed by the Mexican-Cuban songwriter Jorge Zamora, known as Zamorita and sung by the Mexican comic actor “Tin-Tan,” whose real name was German Valdez, was a huge hit in both countries, with its lyrics:

“When I hear that bell ringing, way out there

With its rhythm of delicious Cha cha cha,

I know he’s coming close, the garbage man,

To carry off the stuff that ain’t no good..”

With humor, the singer advises us all to hide so the garbage man won’t get us. Because of the context, it’s understood that the song refers to the person collecting the garbage, although in Cuba we use the terms basurero – garbage man – and basural – dumping ground – interchangeably, interpreting their meaning according to the way they’re used.

For those of us living here, the tragic part comes if you think about trying to hide from the garbage dump instead of the garbage man – closing the doors and windows to avoid the unpleasant smell that is the invisible extension of its closeness.

The garbage pile is like a slow (but not that slow) sinister organism that you can see growing day by day, in three dimensions, alive and in living color. In addition, you have no other choice but to feed it, as if it were some kind of necessary pet. And that’s how dramatic irony conquers all, with epic connotations and pernicious transcendence.

You don’t have to watch a late-night horror film to sportingly raise the adrenaline and/or cortisol levels in your blood a bit. Just passing by the garbage dump of Mastodon proportions, while en route to look for bread, or heading to and from work, can easily provoke a tremor of fear, and “for just cause,” as they say in legalistic terms. You don’t even need a huge imagination.

Of course, we also need to look at it through a less self-destructive lens, since, otherwise it could end by destroying us more quickly and – really – there’s no need to hurry the things that will come to pass – inevitably?

For example, a few days ago I saw the body of a dead rat, which by the way I believe was only three or four millimeters short of reaching the size of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The fact is that it was there with its spirit totally gone, at the foot of a mountain of domestic waste, and it could have felt like a sublime moment if only there had been a golden sunset with a sweet melody in the background, perhaps a trumpet solo in the style of Ennio Morriconi…

Days later, in another distant location, a recurrence of that scene made me pause and think. I wondered if maybe the garbage was contaminated, or the rats were committing mass suicide. I remembered that a few years ago in England there was an epidemic of mad cow disease, and thought maybe something like that could be happening here.

But no, because later I came across a group of kids who were passionately engaged in throwing rocks at a garbage pile, with an energy so great it seemed as if all of them had breakfasted on juicy cuts of top sirloin. Since that possibility seemed far-fetched, I came up and asked them what was the target, and they told me they were killing rats. You tell me.

As the proverb says, “God squeezes but doesn’t strangle.” The community sports centers are far away and transportation is bad – not to mention the fact that the centers themselves are poorly kept up, nearly in ruins, at least in the neighborhoods. The streets are full of ruts and potholes, which makes it impossible to use them for a soccer game or even to play “taco,” which is a form of baseball taken to its simplest possible expression, with broomsticks as bats and a piece of the same stick as a ball.

But see? God provides! We have the rats to recreate the days of hunting and – who knows what else? The imagination creates miracles, and opportunity is a fleeting visitor, as the verse says.

Read more from the diary of Eduardo N. Cordovi here.