Good morning family, welcome to Cuba once again, to Cuba inside. Last week we learned
from a peasant family what life is like in the countryside, how they cook for
themselves, for their animals, how they grow their food, how difficult it is to raise animals
in Cuba and about the many sugar mills that occasions have to do in order to
have a normal life... and why it is so difficult for Cubans to eat beef.
Today we are going to focus on what it is like to live in Cifuentes, Villa Clara, both
in the town and in the most remote places.
Here in El Frasco life is quite calm, there are no problems, there are no fights. All the neighbors, like
most of the people who live here, have lived since they were born, because
they all know each other, they all get along and there are no problems. Thefts are seen from time to time.
Here before there was no electricity, and so I lived until I was 7 years old, and
people did not have a television. Fortunately, in my house there was a
small television, in black and white, that was seen with a battery that my father had, but they made the
video rooms. These video rooms, the function they had was that people
came here at night and here they came to watch the news, they came to see the adventures,
the soap opera, because this television here in the video room worked with a solar panel .
This here is the exploration and camping center, as you can see it is quite
deteriorated and quite bad, I would say, in quite bad condition. This is the only
exploration and camping center here in the province of Villa Clara. That stopped
working, the students stopped coming, that is, the schools,
they started to leave this abandoned, and well, it has reached the point where you are living and where
it is today, that you can practically say that it is useless .
Many of the younger couples have left here. There was a couple
who lived here for some time and sold the house, a normal little house, made of wood, made
of palm fronds. They sold that house for 25,000 Cuban pesos, imagine yourself, a house here in
Frasco cannot cost much more than that because who is going to come to live in the countryside if there is
nothing here. No bus passes here, that is, there is no transportation and if you don't have a
bicycle or a cart and a horse to go to town, you have to go on foot.
Precisely in a cart we are now going to the town where people live a little better.
We have just heard Ariadna's story about the simplicity of living in El
Frasco and how young people leave. This story of shortages and migration
is replicated throughout the country, but can you really be happy with so little?
What would happen in an emergency when the ambulance
does not arrive and you do not have a means of transport to run to a hospital?
The latter is definitely something that overwhelms many people here, since it
has become a reality. Let's take a look at the town of Cifuentes,
the place where Ariadna spends much of her life.
Founded in 1706, with a population of more than 27,000 inhabitants, this is the central street.
The town has a recently restored church, Santa María Magdalena. In
this park, the most important in the town, today parents wait with their children for
the bus to arrive. It's the day to enter the scholarship.
At one end of this central highway you reach Sagua and at the other, Santa Clara.
In addition to having buildings in destruction, neglected, as we have in
Havana, there are also small businesses, both state and private businesses.
Modern means of transportation are scarce; the most common are bicycles and horse-
drawn carts, real estate like the one on the corner, which is being repaired to
be converted into a store in MLC, as in the rest of the country, and
an aging population, also as in the rest of the country. We have reached
a small area where some self-employed people sell food and household items.
- What a humble town. That here where I live there is nothing, you can't see anything, how are they going to compare Havana with this?
And in this place is the bus terminal, here come the people who work
in Santa Clara. To take the first bus you have to be here before 6 in the morning.
Beyond what we have seen, there is not much more to see. From here to there there are only houses and more
houses. As Ariadna rightly says, life is quite simple in this town, perhaps a little more
modern than El Frasco, there are a few shops, most, if not all, in MLC,
slow internet, but even better than in El Frasco,
and some other place to buy food and household supplies.
Half an hour later than expected, the bus arrives that will take the young people for the
scholarship (it continues to high school), the school where they will be without their parents for a week, they will give them food, they will teach them
important things for life, but also of that, what is the correct thought and how to express it.
As many have done, we are also closing the cycle of Cifuentes and El Frasco.
Would you live here, under these conditions? What do you think the future holds for those young people
who went to school today? Let me know in the comments. Thank you very much to those who
made it to the end of this video. See you next week from Cienfuegos, the pearl of the south.