I cannot remember a single moment of my life in Havana when water has not been a concern. Living in this city includes water anxiety.
By Yoani Sanchez (14ymedio)
HAVANA TIMES — We will have two days without water pumping in Havana. The news, barely announced in the official media, is confirmed by the dry pipes and the silent sinks. In my building, most apartments have storage tanks to get through the times when the lack of electricity prevents pumping from the cistern. But this time it’s different. There is a sense of finality and of living in an extreme period in which we may never again hear the roar of the motor that pumps water up to the rooftop tank.
I cannot remember a single moment of my life in Havana when water has not been a concern. Living in this city includes water anxiety. Like every Cuban, I am obsessed with saving every last drop. Under the kitchen counter I keep all kinds of containers—bottles, buckets, jars, and even a basin that must always be kept full. If I could, I would turn anything into an artificial reservoir for when the pipes break, the aqueduct shuts down, and the lack of fuel paralyzes the pumping motors. Years ago, in our home, we also created a rain-collecting system from the terrace.
“Be like water,” said Bruce Lee, one of my childhood idols. I was about seven or eight years old and would come rushing in after pushing a wheelbarrow with a tank from a corner of Central Havana so I could sit in front of the television and watch that slight man move like a wave—decisive and effective. There he was, quiet and beardless, in a world that for me was full of authoritarian beards and shouted slogans. “Take a bath, Yoani, and don’t throw away the water you use because we need it to flush the toilet,” my grandmother would call from the kitchen. “You already have the bucket and the little pitcher ready,” she would emphasize.
Later I went away to boarding school and took a photo of that martial arts expert with me. With his narrow waist he looked down at me from the locker in the dormitory while we counted the days when water did not arrive and the red dust accumulated under our fingernails and on the sheets. He with his gesture calling me to fluidity, and I stuck in a social experiment where fungi multiplied on my feet and hunger in my stomach. “Take the shape of what surrounds you,” he seemed to suggest through his jet-black hair, which was already fading under the sun that filtered through the blinds.
“Be like water,” I told myself when the dormitory bathroom, full of filth, was closed because the precious liquid had not reached that fourth floor for eleven straight days. The day I left, I left Bruce Lee’s poster beside my bunk and walked a long stretch along that road to Alquízar, surrounded by parched fields where the latest delirium of Fidel Castro was trying to materialize—through the Food Plan—the planting of plantains with a microjet system that sucked up the water that should have reached our showers and the sweet potatoes of the local farmers.
This Thursday, March 12, I woke up humming a song. “I’ll tell them I arrived from a strange world,” I said to myself as soon as I put my feet on the floor in the middle of a blackout. The smell of burning garbage has returned after a few days of relief. Last night we heard the echoes of a pot-banging protest in the Lawton area. The wind carried that clatter and also the sound of shouting from a completely dark neighborhood. Noise, like water, has strange ways of spreading. Sometimes it arrives intermittently, and other times it seems the pot that is ringing is only a few meters away, even though someone is striking it in another municipality. During the protests of July 11, 2021 the roars of euphoria kept reaching us even deep into the night.
The tank of my building is falling apart. When the cistern on the ground floor is full, it can fill the giant on the roof two and a half times. But the imposing structure, which distinguishes this concrete block from others in the area and gives it a certain air of an airport control tower, is crumbling. It has supplied more than 140 apartments for four decades and, during all that time, it has not received a single repair. Now the steel is exposed on the outside and the ship’s ladder that once led to the top has lost several rungs to rust.
The last person to climb down that structure was my husband, Reinaldo. As he descended, the steps were disintegrating under his feet. Later a brigade came to assess the damage and calculated that repairing the building’s tank would cost, at minimum, more than three million pesos. That was a couple of years ago, so by now it surely costs double… or triple. In the meantime, fragments have continued to fall. A multifamily apartment building has large communal areas that the Cuban state long ago stopped taking responsibility for and that residents cannot afford to maintain. The hydraulic system is one of the most affected in these buildings that copied Eastern European architecture in this tropical Havana.
My neighbor says there’s little time left, that perhaps two weeks remain before the whole regime collapses and things “start getting fixed.” I am not as optimistic as she is. Sometimes I have the nightmare that the rooftop tank splits open like a pumpkin and I fail to warn the people walking on the sidewalk below in time. Other times I dream that I search and cannot find any more bottles, basins, or buckets to fill. An unexpected hole empties all my reserves, and I can only manage to save what fits in the cup of my hands.
“Be like water,” Bruce Lee repeats to me from somewhere deep in my memory. But how can one take shape and adapt to a world as strange as the one we inhabit? How can one endure in this city if the pipes are dry and the purr of the pump that fills the deteriorating colossus above our heads can no longer be heard?
First published in Spanish by 14ymedio and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.
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