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Waiting for Housing
Yusimí Rodríguez
Journalist
Havana, Cuba

R

obert Siegel (of National Public
Radio) interviewed me on
March 10th. His primary
interest was to learn about racial
inequality, a topic that is almost always
difficult to explain to foreigners, who
come with the notion that the Cuban
Revolution eliminated racism and had
offered equal access to education and
employment to whites, mestizos, and
blacks. To deny this outright would not
be fair or true, but the affirmation that
there is no racism or racial inequality
would be like contradicting our own
government, which has (begrudgingly)
acknowledged these problems in our fair
and socialist society. Yet, explaining it
and, ever more so, demonstrating it as
you stroll through a tourist zone in Old
Havana, with its hotels, picture postcard
buildings, and tourists, was difficult. I
have yet to know why my interviewer
wanted us to cross Havana Bay on the
ferryboat to Regla, a Havana
neighborhood I had not seen since 2002,
when I accompanied my mother to its
church. I was worried that I might know
less about Regla than Siegel and his
entourage: a woman who handled the
mics, the producer, and the Cuban
interpreter. When we had just turned one

of the church’s intersections, a pregnant
woman bore down upon us (a later
learned her name was Kirenia). “Are you
from Canal Habana? Come with me;
what you need to film is over there…”
She pointed to the entrance of turned out
being an albergue [‘provisional shelter’].
“I’ve been living here five years, but
mine has been a special case since I was
11.” She was 32 years old. I had to
disappoint her. I was not from Canal
Habana. The people with me were not
Cuban nor were they there on account of
her or her problems. In any event, we
crossed the street and Siegel had the
opportunity to hear her story and those
of the other albergue inhabitants (people
who had been there who knows how
long), and to see the interior of some of
the extremely narrow cubicles, with their
detectable humidity and visible, cracking
walls. They had makeshift lofts or
mezzanines in them, to maximize space.
The fact that Kirenia took us to the
albergue may have helped show Siegel
what I could not on the other side of the
bay: all the folks we saw in that albergue
were black. Nevertheless, I felt that was
not enough for those stories to be shown
as part of an article in which others were
the focus. I promised Kirenia and her

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