My Dirty Piece of the Sea

My Dirty Piece of the Sea / Yoani Sánchez
Translator: Unstated, Yoani Sánchez
Uprising called the

In 1994 I spent many hours sitting on the wall of the Malecon. He
preferred the area between the Gervasio and Escobar streets, which I
called "my dirty piece of sea." That was a border between the abyss and
the abyss. On one side the rocks and the waves, on the other a sequence
of ruined houses and starving figures looking out over their balconies.
Still, this place allows me to escape the day-to-day strangulation of
the Special Period. If my stomach burned from emptiness, there was still
the hope of finding someone hawking — in a whisper — pizzas or paper
cones of peanuts. When the power cuts made it impossible to be in my hot
room, I also went looking for the sea breeze as a relief. On that
concrete I loved, cried, stared at the horizon wanting to run away, and
even passed a few nights.

But on the morning of August 5 of that year, the Malecón became a
battlefield. Around the ferry dock to Regla people were gathering,
encouraged by the hijackings of several boats throughout the summer. An
extended sensation of the end, of chaos, of "zero hour" was palpable in
the atmosphere. Those waiting to take "the next boat to Florida" were
the poorest, those with the least to lose, those ready for anything.
Their disappointment was great when they learned there would be no
chance of getting on any of these boats. Undoubtedly, that was the spark
of the popular revolt that broke out immediately afterwards; but the
fuel of the protest was hunger, scarcities and desperation.

A contingent of construction workers, disguised as "enraged people,"
lashed out against the unarmed crowd with stick and iron bars. The order
from on high was clear: crush the rebellion, but don't leave behind any
imaged of anti-riot troops repressing the people. The epithets launched
against the outraged of that day were "lumpen, vermin, criminals and
counterrevolutionaries." The majority of them would emigrate in the
coming weeks, on homemade rafts, or simple truck cabs mounted on inner
tubes. Others were sent to prison for facing the shock troops. Fidel
Castro showed up in the middle of it all — only once the situation was
under control — and the official media displayed his presence there as
the confirmation of a great victory. But the truth is that after a few
weeks the government had to permit farmers markets to relieve the
misery. Without the pressure exercised that August 5, we would have
ended up like a "Democratic Kampuchea" in the middle of the Caribbean,
like the experiment of a stubborn tropical Pol Pot.

I no longer like sitting in front of my dirty piece of the sea. Some of
the horror of that August 5 is still there, sandwiched between the
cracks in the wall.

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