The Despair of a Gas Station Lines Manager in Havana
for more than 6,000 gas station customers
Pedro Garce Fights Against ’Imperialism’ and the Bureaucracy of Those ’From Above’.
HAVANA TIMES – Every time he starts writing in his Telegram group, Pedro Garce, organizer of the lines for fuel in El Tángana and two other gas stations in the municipality of Plaza de la Revolución, makes customers tremble. For days, the administrator – committed to “order and discipline” – has only brought bad news, almost always linked to the breakdown of a pump or the suspension of sale.
Garce doesn’t like to “collide” so often with the bureaucracy and makes it clear in the chat. On Saturday night, for example, he sent a message announcing the suspension of the El Tángana service. The appearance of problems in the pumps that dispatch the fuel and a “cultural activity” on the Esplanade of La Piragua, forced him to make the decision.
The interruption of the sale implies that Garce must reorganize the gas line and the schedule for each customer to buy. They can spend weeks on the list to acquire a few liters of fuel. In this specific case, he must deal with the 75 drivers who were on the previous day’s list for regular gasoline and who had to be reorganized this Sunday.
The energy situation and the frequent shortage of fuel do not make his life easy, and many times, when gasoline appears, he must summon customers in a hurry; hence, his mantra: “Be punctual and disciplined, remember that if you miss your turn you lose it,” whether it’s at dawn or early morning. The arrival of always meager amounts of fuel forces drivers to remain “prepared and alert,” as if they were expecting a hurricane.
Last Thursday, one day before the “march of the fighting people” called by the regime, the El Tángana service center had one of its most chaotic days. Garce not only had to announce the suspension of the service until 3:00 pm due to a sudden blackout, but, two hours after resuming it, he also had to stop the sale again “due to the measures taken for the development of the march [of the fighting people],” scheduled for the next day.
The administrator hoped that the delays would not be too long, but at 8:30 p.m. he made a hopeless announcement in the group: “Activities continue on the Anti-Imperialist Platform, and, once completed, the dismantling process begins, maintaining the restrictions on access to the gas station. It has been collectively decided to resume the service from tomorrow.”
The manager regrets that “situations occur” in which customers do not empathize with his work. “My commitment is only to the people, to the masses. Got it?” he wrote this week in the chat. A little later, he shared a message from the Gente de Barrio channel – dedicated to sharing official content – that criticized the operation of the lines in the gas stations. The text questioned, from the point of view of “those below,” as Garce is considered, something that the organizer of the line himself has described as “irrational”: the arrival of fuel at a gas station that does not have pumps in good enough condition to dispatch it, as happened on Thursday.
“The tanker truck that entered El Tángana is, irrationally, for gasoline, and the pumps there are broken. There is another type of gasoline that arrived 15 days ago, and the pumps were not available either. I’m calling the government and the Cimex authorities but they don’t answer. Don’t worry, we will look for a solution,” he then encouraged the more than 6,000 customers that make up the group.
Just a few days before the administrator apologized profusely for the mess in the line – “this is crazy,” he criticized. “I hope you understand me,” “I’m making an important effort,” “this is not my fundamental function,” Garce explained after making a mistake in which he had summoned more than 1,000 drivers instead of the 625 he had to call. “I recognize it with total frankness. You know that that [amount of] gasoline doesn’t go very far.”
For Garce, as for Esther Trujillo, the organizer of the Guanabacoa gas lines, his work is a constant crusade against “imperialism,” which limits resources, and against those “from above” who do not know how to manage them. In his code, the first law is to provide order and the second is to serve the customers “as they deserve.” It’s a matter of luck whether he can handle the “many tasks” and “the time pressure” in order to fulfill his commitment.
Translated by Regina Anavy for Translating Cuba.
Sounds like a man who is treading water and doesn’t know that his boat has sunk. Such is Cuba.