The Bad Neighborhood of the Bright Light

The Bad Neighborhood of the Bright Light / Tania Diaz Castro
Posted on October 9, 2013

HAVANA, Cuba, October www.cubanet.org — It is called the Bad
Neighborhood of the Bright Light, a hamlet situated to the west of Santa
Fe in Havana province. Its residents, almost all black and mixed
(emigrants from areas to the east), say that in the beginning, more than
twenty years ago, the houses on the edge of the sea were huts, lifted on
a base of old posts and materials found in the trash, and that very few
of its residents are registered in the Identity Card offices, nor are
their houses, now in better repair, legalized by the Housing Authority.

A few days ago Claribel returned to this neighborhood; she is a Cuban
who escaped on a raft to the United States five years ago. Such was my
curiosity, that I asked a neighbor, a friend of her family, to take me
to meet her.

We took a bicitaxi and with great fear braved the convoluted, dangerous
and muddy streets to the little house where Claribel's family lived, a
few yards from the sea. The sight was depressing. She is a
twenty-something girl, tousled hair, with the face of a black doll and a
contagious smile. But in the hut, still made of broken boards and a
cement-fiber roof, lived her parents, brother and grandparents in deep
poverty, or as they themselves told me, barely surviving.

"I'm not surprised. It's all I knew," Claribel told me. "They can't even
drink a glass of milk a day. The monthly wages of my brother don't last
half a month, they still haven't fixed the streets, there's no piped
drinking water, no toilets with plumbing, no bus that comes here, and
what's worse, the money they have isn't enough for proper nutrition for
the eldery, because the products in the "shopping" are very expensive.
In a word: My family lives as badly as when they came to the Bad
Neighborhood of the Bright Light some ten years ago. It was called that
from the beginning because everyone lacked gas for cooking. Today many
of them still use the old dangerous burners."

I didn't want to say goodbye without asking them why they'd left the
eastern provinces, and the grandfather answered:

"There, in Santa Cruz del Sur, our social life regressed because
everything was deteriorating little by little. The hopes that the
Revolution gave us evaporated like will-o-wisps. The Haiti sugar mill
shut down. The young people gave themselves over to drinking. Nothing
functioned, not the bakery, the mail service, the little restaurant. The
village became a ghost town, while Fidel kept giving the same speeches,
talking about the crises in other countries, without saying that Cuba
was more than dead. Me, I was proud of my native home, when we left,
everything was destroyed, just like so many forgotten villages in Cuba."

Before we left, we asked if there was a paved road out of there, so we
could avoid the bicitaxi. There wasn't any. Back in Santa Fe, despite
its broken streets and its sidewalks overgrown with grass, we thought
we'd come to Paradise.

Tania Díaz Castro

9 October 2013, From Cubanet

Source: "The Bad Neighborhood of the Bright Light / Tania Diaz Castro |
Translating Cuba" -
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