Guajira Guantanamera

I’ve officially fallen in love with this charming place. The vibrant town and all of its
quirks make up for the difficulties and frustrations of working in Cuba.

Work things aside, I’ve gotten into a nice rhythm here and am meeting some fascinating
people. I am taking salsa classes three times per week at a dance company a few blocks
away from my house. The dance company just put on a four day dance festival and I
attended an incredible dance show every night. The ballerinas are all extremely friendly
and open. After each dance show, we were invited to stay and party with the dance
companies. I have never been so intimidated to dance in public. Not only are they all
Cuban and have this amazing innate sense of rhythm, but they are all trained dancers…
Intimidating. Luckily, I hide my nervousness by acting like a fool and joking around,
so I’m able to at least make them laugh. All of this was free and we never once felt
unwelcome. People here are incredibly friendly and welcoming.

As a “gracias”, P and I want to put together a little show for the dance company, where
he would play his accordion and I would spin fire poi. The only problem is finding lamp
oil to light my poi. And finding a place where the police won’t stop me from playing with
fire. Normally I wouldn’t worry, but I’m living in a town where if you’re sitting in the
park with your foot on the bench, the park “attendants” come by and reprimand you. I
can’t imagine the reaction of people watching a foreigner spinning balls of fire in public.

On the work front, things are progressing, though very slowly. The arrival of
the “Canadian Delegation” was both motivating and discouraging. Discouraging because
the so-called Canadian Delegation consisted of just two men who work as consultants
for CIDA. In the 48 hours that they were here, they spent a total of 90 minutes on two
farms and in one part of the community. I can’t imagine what they can ascertain from that
amount of time, the little that they saw and the few questions that they asked.

It is incredibly frustrating for us as interns and especially for the farmers to have these
people come with so much supposed power and only see such a small part of the project.
Our jefe here made sure that the Canadian Delegation only saw and heard about the most
positive parts of the project. We did our best to have alone time with the delegates to tell
them what is actually happening on the ground here and I hope that our comments were
taken seriously.

The visit from the delegates was also motivating in a sense because we realized that
this project isn’t as f*cked as we thought. There have been amazing advancements in
terms of social wellbeing and environmental restoration since it originally started, and
though the project is as far from perfect as you can get, something special is happening
here. It gave me the little nudge I needed to get away from the negative mindset that I
had been surrounded by. I thrive on challenges and seeing the project through the lens of
the delegates helped me understand that this is one of the most difficult systems I might
ever work in. If I can survive Cuban bureaucracy and the Cuban no-solution headspace, I
know that I can work in other difficult situations and this is making me work harder here.

I also realized that I’ve managed to turn this internship into a water management
experience, which was exactly what I set out to find last January.

The four of us held our first workshop on Saturday and we had a great turnout. The main
objective of the meeting was to put together different “comites”. The idea behind this is
to ensure a smooth transition for the end of the project and teach the farmers how to put
together their own workshops and take charge of their own community development. We
will be involving the farmers in creating workshops, bringing specialists to the farms,
organizing events and planning the implementation of their sustainability plan so that the
project continues to gain ground after we withdraw.

It’s a great experience to be here at the end of a project and work on a transition and
withdrawal plan. Though, the kind of work I’m doing right now feels more like the start
of a project, not the end of one. The baseline assessment I’m working on should have
been done a long time ago. I’m evaluating the farms’ current water situation so that after
the system is installed there’s a way to concretely evaluate changes. I’m using specific
indicators like illnesses, water use, hours spent collecting water as well as general
comments that come up in conversation with the farmers about their view of water.

When the CEO was here a few weeks ago, the idea of creating a water comity was
thrown out and a few people volunteered. Since then, they haven’t done anything or even
met to discuss what they want to do. On Saturday, I sat down with my water comity and
facilitated creating clear objectives of what they want to accomplish and made an action
plan for the next few weeks that I’m here as well as their goals after I leave.

The main problem right now is that the water system has yet to be installed. After the
CEO of FBC left and the Canadian Delegation left, the work basically stopped. The work
that needs to be done is quite simple and back home would probably take a week of work.
Here, to use my favourite Cuban dicho (saying): No es facil!

Here is a BRIEF summary of the issues involved in putting together the water system,
excluding all the finer details of the process. You might want to sit down for this. Or
stand up and then sit back down.

Before anything could start, paperwork had to be properly filled out. This of course took
three months to do and only began after the pipes arrived from Spain, which in itself was
quite the ordeal.

Each of the 14 farmsteads has a 2100L water tank that will be raised onto concrete
plinths. To do this, a round hole 1m deep and 1m in diameter had to be dug for the
foundation of the concrete pillars. Simple? Not when shovels are inaccessible. Digging
the holes took two weeks longer than planned.

Once the holes were dug, the cement pillars could be built. Simple? Not when cement is
inaccessible. Supposedly, the director of the empresa that supplies cement had a nervous

breakdown, so no one has had access to cement for some time.

Did I mention the difficulty in finding the ribar (reebar? rubar? I have no idea how to
spell that word…) that will hopefully hold the poor quality cement together? Also, since
there isn’t enough cement to build all the pillars properly and have a stable foundation,
they needed rocks and sand delivered to the farms. Simple? Not when trucks and gas are
in short supply and a different empresa controls sand and rock supplies and requires extra
paperwork.

The six farms that are closer to Gtmo will be connected by water pipes to the community
of Cecilia, where a small brown river flows and supplies guajiras with enough water for
their basic needs. Once the concrete pillars are built and the tanks are raised, a machine
can come in, make a trench for the water pipes and the system can be finalized. Our
jefe kept blaming the wet ground on the fact that the pipes had yet to be set up. This is
interesting since one of the main reasons this water system is so necessary is because the
area is incredibly arid.

The 8 farms that are closer to the community of Paraguay already have the pipe
infrastructure and are connected to the village’s water supply. The issue here is that the
pump in the community is broken. Part of the system that was bought with the budget for
the project was water pumps. All that needs to be done to connect the furthest 8 farms to
running water is to set up the pump in the village of Paraguay. Simple? I still don’t have
an explanation why this hasn’t been done.

I’ve never been anywhere where access to basic material was so difficult. The farmers are
getting to the point where they are ready to start digging the trench by hand. The craziest
part of all of this is that all but three of the farms are directly on the main highway and
easily accessible. Today we met with our jefe to confront him and we made a plan to
continue the work. Tomorrow a group of men from the Partido arrive to check out the
farms. News of the project has made its way up to the Comandante so it should be an
interesting visit.

I can’t believe that it’s already November. The four of us celebrated our six month
anniversary this weekend! I’ve never spent so much intense time in the company of
such a small group of people. We’ve gotten to the point where we can’t imagine going
home and not seeing one another for a few days. Speaking of home, I received an early
Christmas present from my mom who changed my flight home so that I could come
home for Christmas! It’ll have been almost exactly one year since I took off with no plan
other than accomplishing my three personal goals: live abroad, improve another language
and do something to advance my career goals. Not a bad way to spend a year!