Forced to Live with Open Sewage

By Fernando Ravsberg

HAVANA TIMES – An inspector recently fined us because we had thrown some buckets of water on the street and a little reached the sidewalk. “Don’t you know comrade that it is only allowed on Saturdays?”, she asked very seriously, while taking out her booklet for giving fines.

I replied that for a week the feces have run all over our street without anyone intervening or putting fines. The sewage passes over all the intakes of drinking water, the same ones that are full of leaks.

“That is not a matter for me,” the inspector told me saying I should speak with my People’s Power delegate, who coincidentally lives in the building with the overflowed septic tank.

The delegate was very attentive but several days later he told us the usual for any problem: “I filed the complaint but there is no answer yet.”

“Apparently there are few trucks and many tanks overflowed,” they told him but the truth is that with 50 dollars in less than an hour you have a tanker extracting the waste. I speak knowingly because I have seen it with my own eyes.

I usually am the one on our street seeking out the tanker trucks every time the pit of my neighbors overflows. This time I wanted the experience of “going through the established channels” but at this rate we will all end with cholera before the raw sewage stops running through the streets.
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Note: Finally the tanker truck appeared (on March 22nd) and, in just 20 minutes, managed to stop the sewage from flowing down my street. The neighbors are really happy.