Chronicles of Havana: Chronicle of a Monday with a flavor of Wednesday

Havana/Three in the morning. There is electricity and water, so I set up the electric pressure cooker with some beans, load the washing machine with everything that has accumulated, and get into the shower. There are Mondays that seem like Wednesdays because of the fatigue they carry. Weeks that begin already old and exhausted. Since last Friday we have had only a few hours of power each day and, in my mind, the days are stuck together as if it were all one long, unbearable day.

The water revives me. I recover the thread of hope that had been lost on Sunday or perhaps it was Saturday. I don’t remember. It has barely dawned and I leave for Old Havana. I prefer to go on foot. The price of private taxis has risen so much, due to the fuel crisis, that I have to choose between making the trip or returning in an almendrón, because the entire circuit is crazy for the pocket. A long lament sounds on Ayestarán Street, which also seems like a single voice coming out of different faces.

“Everything was ruined for me,” one elderly woman tells another. “I had to eat the chicken I had in a single day because it didn’t last today,” grumbles a man who is talking to two others on a corner. “Call her to see if there is electricity in her block and we can bring her the girl’s milk so she doesn’t get cut off,” shouts a woman, with a baby in her arms, to a young man who is leaving on a motorcycle. In the nearest garbage can, you can see a package with some pork steaks, already greenish, that were going to be the meal of some family.

“I don’t care if they come from Yuma or Burundi, but let them come now,” shouts a woman looking out from her balcony.

I turn into Drain. “I don’t care if they come from Yuma or Burundi, but let them come now,” shouts a woman looking out from her balcony. He has a threadbare housecoat and a desperate face. “My refrigerator is wide open, because it is useless,” he describes. Below, several neighbors add their own dramas, also loudly. “In my house we haven’t slept for three days because of the heat and the mosquitoes,” explains one. “I already said at work not to wait for me, I haven’t been able to shower since Thursday.”

I go out to Carlos III, the informal vendors begin to set up their stalls. There is the same thing as always: tubes of toothpaste, cigarette packs, cell phone chargers taken from the trash and medications without prescriptions. But approaching Reina Street I see merchandise that I initially find difficult to identify. It is a mannequin that represents a girl a little over ten years old. He is naked and wears a black wig. Next to her, a man offers the doll without having a clear price. “How much will you give me?” he asks me when he sees me curious.

The figure is like the mannequins that populated the stores of my childhood. No fun, as were those clothes that we could only buy with a box or a coupon from the ration book intended for “industrial products.” I hated that outfit. They were always too big or too tight, the fabric was itchy, or on the day we had to shop, the blouse I wanted ran out and I had to go home with pants that seemed more suitable for working in agriculture than for walking with my friends. The 80s were so ugly for fashion in Cuba that sometimes I don’t even want to look at my photos from that decade.

The mannequin has some peeling parts. “If you give me 5,000 pesos, you get it,” the merchant insists. I imagine carrying the girl with the black wig through the streets of Havana as I return home. I have to laugh when I get to the part where I carry it up the 14-story staircase and we rest together on some landing while the neighbors passing by inquire about its origin and the use I will give it. My dogs would burst into barking as they saw the three-foot-tall figure walk through the door. I shake off the daydream and tell the seller that I would only buy it to make a horror movie, but I already live in one, I don’t need to shoot it.

I widen my strides and finally manage to reach Old Havana. Just outside the once-glamorous Mercado del Oriente, a woman talks on the phone, begging to save some food. freezer from a friend Finally he finds space in the refrigerator, which is also turned off due to lack of power, but “it remains somewhat cold.” I don’t find a single tourist on the entire road. I only see people in long lines outside the banks, the Etecsa office and the Lonja del Comercio where there is an office of the Spanish Consulate in Havana.

In front of me walk two women dressed in a typical costume of bright colors and a headscarf. They look for a foreign visitor who will pay them for a photo that they will then take to their country and show mischievously. They are like mannequins in a shop window that no one passes by.