Old town lost, in digital pictures

Posted on September 8, 2008
Filed Under Blogroll, digital media |

It is now more than 24 hours after Hurricane Ike rammed into my hometown of Gibara, Cuba, and I have yet to make phone contact with my folks over there.  Neither have my relatives from other parts of the island or from the US.  But I have already seen images of the destruction, as some pictures are already making the rounds on the web since early Monday.  Quite an accomplishment for that particular piece of digital stucco, since there is no power or phone connection in the area, and the roads are said to be a mess.

So here I am, trying to reconnect with familiar places by looking through a fog of rubble. And wondering if this is IT, the moment in which Cuba finally becomes one of those places like war-torn Afghanistan, or Beirut, where every picture or frame of video seems to contain a certain amount of rubble. You know, one of those places that wherever you look you find a roofless building, or a house with holes where the windows should be.

That is not an unlikely situation given the one-two punch of Ike and Gustav in less than two weeks, covering absolutely all of Cuba’s territory.  Add decades of precarious maintenance and shaky infrastructure–all the ingredients for a tipping point.

Gibara used to be a prosperous old town (established in 1817).  An international sea harbor, it was a town where commerce, the arts, and the bohemian spirit in general, flourished.  In fact, the Wikipedia entry for Gibara reads as if it were still the early twentieth century, when Gibara was “a port of call for the American Munson [shipping] Line.” It may be the case that the page is just screaming for an update or not.  It could as well be intentional.  As a beloved teacher at the University of Havana told me once, people from Gibara live as if pretending that time had not passed. 

Well, I don’t have the heart to be the one who sets the record straight in Wikipedia. They still have the poetry readings, the art galleries and the “Festival de Cine Pobre” (Low Budget Movie Festival), a sort of Third-world Sundance that takes place there every year. But the old charm may be hard to rescue this time.  It may not be possible to restore all those ancient buildings with accuracy, when so many basic needs of daily live will hardly be met in the next few years.  And I know for a fact that this is a loss that will be mourned there and around the world just as if somebody had perished in the storm.

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