“The boys have gotten good grades at school and we wanted to reward them with an outing. We sold some dollars that my brother sent me and we paid five thousand pesos for a round trip to the beach, to a neighbor who rents an air-conditioned bus. They tend to be stuck in the house watching television all the time. We try to isolate them from violence and drug use,” describes Nadia.
But due to bad weather, the trip to the beach was cancelled. “With the money they gave us back we decided to take the boys to the Finca de los Monos, a place where there are electronic games in a pleasant atmosphere. Or at least I thought so,” says Maikel.
What is the Monkey Estate?
The Finca de los Monos is a mansion considered among the most exotic in Havana, located on the same corner where Palatino Street converges with Santa Catalina Avenue, a road escorted by centuries-old flamboyant trees that in spring spread their red and yellow flowers, drawing sidewalk tapestries
Although its name was La Quinta de Las Delicias, it is popularly known as the Finca de los Monos, because more than 200 primates of forty species lived on the land of that property. The monkeys were accompanied by a tiger, an elephant, several brown bears, peacocks, macaws, canaries, Japanese roosters, crocodiles, horses and deer. It was the first zoo in Cuba under the care of the philanthropist Rosalía Abreu, who had a predilection for primates and studied their behavior for scientific purposes.
The beautiful building was built in 1906 and was designed by French architect Charles B. Brun, who was inspired by Gothic, Neo-Gothic and Neo-Moorish styles. The Havana mansion, which borders the Casino Deportivo neighborhood and is very close to the old Coca-Cola soft drink bottling plant, is shaped like a medieval castle and its plots in some way imitate the gardens of Versailles in Paris.
Due to the chaotic urban transportation service, Nadia, her husband Maikel and their two children walked with their children to the Finca de los Monos, a kilometer and a half from the house. “When it cleared up we took a backpack with two bottles of water. When we arrived, we found out that the UJC had scheduled an activity for the beginning of summer.
Like a charge to the machete
“The atmosphere was tense, they describe. We were in the cafeteria when the fight started. That was a charge with the machete like in the time of the mambises. Hundreds of teenagers, most of them black and mestizo, who according to the Finca employees came from Palatino, Canal del Cerro and the blocks of buildings in front of the Coca-Cola, began to fight each other with knives, mochas, knives, sticks and handmade injectors that they used as guns,” says Maikel and adds:
“The crowd, in a stampede, went to take refuge in a safe place. Through the windows you saw the knife blows that came and went. It looked like a Japanese samurai movie. The police, as always, arrived when everything was over. That was the closest thing to the massacres that Cuban television news narrates when violent revolts occur in the streets of the United States. It is not known for certain whether there were deaths or the number of injured. The truth is that in the interior streets of the Finca de los Monos there was blood. With that experience we were welcomed and invited. “You can’t go out on the street.”
What the authorities say, but what happened
According to a note from the Government of Havana, “the incident caused two injuries, who received immediate medical attention without danger to life. There are no deceased.” But a police source said that “the deaths were nine and the cases could increase because there are several badly injured boys who are in therapy and the prognosis for their survival is reserved. The serious and minor injuries were more than forty.”
Although the state press tries to hide it, murders, femicides and armed robberies are increasing, in the capital and the rest of the country.
Live locked up
Oscar, 81, and Marlene, 79, a retired couple, live in a large, gated house that looks like a bunker, in the neighborhood of La Víbora. His two children emigrated in 2022, during the stampede of more than 600,000 Cubans who decided to flee the ideological asylum, the shortages and the lack of future. The elderly live to eat. Their miserable pensions, which add up to 4,500 pesos between the two of them, “are only enough for us to pay for electricity, water, gas and buy the items we need. Our children, when they can, send us some money or buy us food in those businesses that the government has,” says Oscar.
“We don’t open the door to anyone. We serve people behind the bars of the fence. Since we don’t have enough money, we sell soursops, mangoes and sour oranges from the bushes we have in the yard. We only go outside when we go to the grocery store or the doctor. They have already robbed several old people on the block, they even killed a woman thinking she had money. We are very afraid,” confesses Marlén.
Why so much violence?
One of the reasons for the rise of violence in Cuba, asserts Carlos, a sociologist, has been “the notable increase in poverty. If we take as valid the data from international institutions that define poverty as those people who earn less than a dollar and a half a day, then poverty in the country covers 90 percent of the population. And in that 90 percent there are professionals and owners of houses and apartments. Since their salaries or pensions do not allow them to repair their homes or buy furniture or appliances, their quality of life has declined in the last five years. They have gone from having breakfast, lunch and dinner, to eating only one meal a day and selling the valuables they had left.
“This structural poverty, which affects almost the entire society, hits even those who receive dollars, who do not use that money to invest or to open a business that allows them to make profits. They use those dollars to survive by buying food, medicine, and paying for electricity and other expenses. In the last circle of hell are those who do not receive dollars and on average their salaries fluctuate between 2,100 pesos, the minimum wage, and 4,000 pesos (monthly), the average salary, equivalent to five or ten dollars, depending on the change in the market. informal. The government’s social assistance provides subsidies, which are insufficient, to just over 600,000 people. But those in need of financial assistance in Cuba can reach two million people. The country is trapped in a labyrinth where there is no way out. Structural and multisystemic failures are caused by the economic, social and political model. It is a terminal crisis. There is no possible repair for the disaster. It is urgent to build a new model and a social pact,” concludes the Havana sociologist.
Why the price of the dollar fluctuates
Igor, who has been in the currency buying and selling business for ten years, says that “the high value that the dollar has reached can be explained. There are no offers of goods and services and the markets are bare. I cannot certify that a dollar costs 400 pesos. The price is dictated by the supply, which is low, and the demand, which is high, from people who want to emigrate and business owners who need foreign currency to replenish supplies. When there is a deficit there will always be speculation. You can haggle and try to sell a dollar ten or fifteen pesos more expensive than what was indicated in El Toque (an independent medium that serves as a barometer for currencies in the informal market), but a dollar can never cost 280 pesos or less as it was quoted ago. one week”.
In his opinion, this drop was caused by a marked interest from the government and MSMEs, allied to the regime or not, who “seeing how their sales decreased, many even began to make losses, they blamed this fall on the high value of the dollar. It is not a completely wrong calculation. But you don’t want to see the full picture. If the government banks sold foreign currency, if stores in pesos and foreign currency were well supplied and if the four million Cubans, including state workers and pensioners, received a fair payment, the dollar would be quoted at 20 or 30 pesos as six or seven years ago,” explains Igor
El Toque is not to blame for the devaluation of the peso nor is there a campaign by the ’empire’ to impoverish Cubans and even less so that crime prevails in Cuban society. The only enemy is the government, incapable of producing food, recognizing and respecting individual freedoms and neutralizing violence.
@FromHavana
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