The Days of Water
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HAVANA TIMES – No, I’m not going to talk about Cuban director Manuel Octavio Gomez’ movie of the same name that premiered in July 1971 and recreates the real life of Antoñica Izquierdo, a peasant from Pinar del Rio who lived in the latter half of the 1930s and was said to have the ability to cure diseases with water. That movie was the first fictional Cuban feature film shot in color and with direct sound.
However, the days of water I’m talking about are the current vicissitudes and risky adventures of the carefully tracked days when it’s our turn to receive the precious liquid in Havana. I specify the location, because I’ll be referring to certain things about my past and present life here in these regional domains of my existence. However, [regarding water], instead of “in Havana,” I could say “in Cuba,” and I suppose even outside our borders, because the problem of water is a topic of planetary scope.
I was going to say galactic importance, thinking about the Milky Way, since the products related to that also suffer a superlative degree of shortage here. But anyway, the matter we’re talking about, let’s say the million-dollar topic, is water. No reason to tangle the strands.
We’re lucky in my neighborhood – really! – that our water is guaranteed to arrive regularly every third day, from before nine am until nearly three or four pm, sometimes until five. Although that’s not always true either, in part, because every so often they turn it on at noon and by three it’s already gone.
It has its oscillations. The reason could easily be that the one charged with the task of going out to open the regulating valves for the flow or stoppage of water didn’t get assigned the fuel needed for their means of transportation. Okay then! Because everyone understands that the gasoline situation has its own separate problematic.
On other occasions, it’s a matter of some repairs being undertaken, because they’re working to modernize different sectors of the city’s hydraulic network. When doing this, it becomes necessary to close some lines for a number of days, and if the municipality or a part of the place where you live is nearby or next door, then – oh well, if it was your turn, you got hit.
Then there are the seasons of drought, when it doesn’t rain much or simply doesn’t rain at all, due to some messy situation with el Niño or la Niña, out there in the Pacific Ocean.
So, thank God it was just a problem with the girl or the boy, because if it were for something violent, things would really be out of control! Anyway, the problem is that when it doesn’t rain as it should, the water table sinks, the rivers lose current or dry up, the level of the reservoirs drops and the volume of water that supplies the cities and the country is super, extra, mega-, extremely and ultra affected. The problem of water is a global one, but you only see the part that touches you personally. Sometimes we’re very inconsiderate that way.
I don’t remember clearly, but I heard my parents say that before, in the fifties, there was always water in the sinks, the taps, the faucets, or however you want to call them – all hours, every day, and it was never lacking. What I do recall clearly is that in the early days of the sixties, despite everything that made people call it the wonderful decade, in my house – the same one I’m still living in – we already had to carry water in buckets some two blocks uphill.
Almost everyone already had a small homemade wooden cart with iron axles, a rudder, and four wheels made from the steel bearings of trucks or buses. We called these chivichanas. People would tie a tin tank holding some fifty-five gallons of water on top of that artefact. Many young people made a small daily living carrying water with this apparatus.
So, even in that era we were already hauling water in this part of the world. Later, things got somewhat better, because by then you could ask the community organizations to send a tanker truck. That was a state service, meaning that the government was there at the service of the population. Since the State didn’t have the capacity to pump the water to the higher altitude zones, it offered to make up for it by sending tanker trucks to fill the cisterns. In passing, the neighbors would carry water in buckets directly from the trucks.
That then became a juicy business for the tanker truck drivers, their bosses, and those who manipulated the water sources that supplied the trucks. In short, everyone was involved in raising the cost of a tanker truck’s trip to guarantee the water supply for your house. Didn’t I say that the decade of the sixties was marvelous for many people?
Later, things stabilized, but they never got back to what was normal in the old long-past years of the fifties. The shortage of water became normal, and we accepted that it came only on certain days of the week.
Now comes the worst part
The Havana network of aqueducts is old; in some places in the city like Lawton, that began to be urbanized in the nineteen forties, the age of the water pipe networks dates from there.
If the water flow were constant, the pipes would last longer and be less dangerous. The problem is that the pipes are exposed to a process of wet then dry, over many hours. This creates stresses and strains, forces and cracks.
Now, consider that the garbage is collected now in large dump trucks equipped with a heavy shovel in the front. The garbage piles are enormous – almost every three or four blocks – and the shovel equipment creates a lower and lower surface level. Hence, pools of water collect around the outlet pipes on the days they turn on the water, or also with the rains. Such stagnant puddles are a lovely sight. Factor in the garbage, and it all forms a breeding ground for pathogenic microorganisms, I imagine, because the rotting and stench aren’t synonyms of anything else.
That accumulated water, enriched by the heat and fermentation, permeates the ground. Not only can it get into the water pipes, but it seeps deep within them when they’re empty. When they fill, that dirty water reaches our homes, and is used for drinking, bathing, cleaning floors and washing vegetables, what a horrible thought.
I don’t drink it, not even boiled, but I do use it to bathe. I go look for water to drink at a church located at some distance away, but that guarantees filtration and purification with ozone. It’s worth the trouble.
And now – class dismissed for today, as the verse says.