Identidades in English No 3, September 2014 | Page 16

Interviewer: Have you been able to make formal
complaints or requests about this to the authorities?

The mother: Yes. We have complained about it
and what they did is put up special posts, but
that’s it. That was all they did. They have done
nothing more. The sewage canals are open;
they’re just channels. They flow openly and create total contamination. That’s where the children
play. They stick their hands in there, their feet,
sticks, and then all that goes in their mouths.
Interviewer: Are there easy solutions to these
problems?
MZG: The open area is not longer than 50 meters.
We have tried to clean it up ourselves, but they
don’t give us any materials with which to do this.
Even though we could and would do it ourselves.
Interviewer: What about the People’s Power delegates? How have they responded?
MZG: I don’t know them.
The mother: The delegates come, have meetings
and everything stays the same, because they don’t
see a solution for this.
Interviewer: Do a lot of children live here in the
settlement?

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MZG: If you live here, you cannot have your
child in Oriente Province (in the East). We who
live here know what the economic situation is at
the work centers. No everyone has a good job and,
even if you do, the salary does not allow you to
get your own house. We live here because we
have no home anywhere else. We came here as
part of a work contingent. We met, married, had
a family, and needed privacy. We could not live
in temporary housing. I didn’t come here to go
around in circles; I came here to find a better
standard of living. But I got screwed out of my
job. With that our finances collapsed. I needed to
provide for my family. So I decided to buy a teeny
space and build this.
Interviewer: So, you have right to the basic food
allotment?
MZG: What basic food allotment? These kids
here have no right to anything. They get zero
food. Everything here has to be bought on the
black market.
The mother: Like a lot of other mothers, I had to
suffer when my kids were little. There were many
times they cried for a bottle of milk and I had none
to give them, not even sugar to put in water and
give them sugar water. I had to calm them some
other way.
Interviewer: So, you’re saying that these kids
who have been born here in Havana have no right
to the basic family ration?
The mother: No. They have no right.
MZG: We have the documents here that prove
that our kids were born here in the Naval Hospital
in East Havana and the Maternity Hospital on
Línea Street.
The mother: Let me tell you something else. It is
the government that puts us in this situation and
imposes this discrimination on us. Our children
are discriminated against at school; everywhere
they go they are treated as though they were
strange, foreign.
MZG: As if they were ‘animals’ because they
live in a squatter settlement. We who live here are
like heroes. We have no right to live. But we live.
We can’t even work, because we are persecuted.
We don’t have an official change of address so we
can’t work but we survive with honesty and dignity. Why is the talk about squatters so bad? As
soon as they hear there was a theft at the store,