“I’ve lived here in Cojimar all my life and I’ve never seen anything so sad”
By Jose Lassa (14ymedio)
HAVANA TIMES – “Take care of your people. Your garbage pollutes.” The sign on a small wall on the beach of Cojímar – known as El Chacón – east of Havana, becomes a bad joke when the visitor looks out at the coast: a long landfill, with several strata, between the weeds and the sea.
Cojímar is still the town of Santiago, Hemingway’s battered fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea. But to the poverty of the town, which was already a humble but very lively community in the 1950s, are now added entire months of waste accumulation. Almost a year ago, when a reporter from 14ymedio toured Cojímar and Alamar, El Chacón was already submerged in the garbage, dragged from the bay and the river of the area.
“The beach was a place where families and tourists came to enjoy themselves. Sometimes I feel helpless when I see how everything has deteriorated,” says Ana María González, owner of a small coffee shop in the area. The woman remembers the times when the beach was full of laughter and children. “On weekends I prepared lunch, and we went to the beach to spend the day. It was a close and cheap option, and my children had a great time.”
At the time, El Chacón was one of the most beautiful places on the capital’s coast. At the end of the coastal curve is the 17th century “castillito” that was the last bastion against French pirates and English invaders. The old tower gave charm to the place, in whose waters sailed the yacht Pilar, of the American Nobel Prizewinner (1954), in search of Nazi submarines that – it was thought at the time – loaded fuel in some Cuban key.
Now, however, “the fall in tourism has made the authorities prioritize other areas,” laments Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, a veteran fisherman from Cojímar. “We used to have tourists buying fresh fish right here. Now, they don’t even want to get close.”
Some insist on setting a date for the decline of El Chacón: 2017, the year of Hurricane Irma, which devastated the northern coast of Havana. However, it’s the tide and the river current that have, over time, returned to the area’s inhabitants everything they have thrown in the water.
No one wants – or can – walk along the beach anymore. Not to mention swimming in its waters. You can barely see a path of sand below the carpet of waste: it shows that, in spite of themselves, many residents of Cojímar must cross the beach.
The complaints that frequently appear in the Havana press have been worthless. Reinier Torres Cruz, a resident of Cojímar and president of the Alto Voltaje motorcycle club, led a beach cleaning in 2019. His description of the landscape, published in Trabajadores, already presaged the current situation.
“The river brings the largest amount of garbage to the beach,” Torres explained. “It is dragged from Regla and Guanabacoa, and, as if that were not enough, there are industries that also dump their waste in the river. That’s why it takes so much work to keep our bay clean.”
In August 2024, the Regional Office of Culture for Latin America and the Caribbean, in collaboration with UNESCO, carried out cleaning work. They collected as many as 150 bags of garbage.
On December 15, the restored Golfito de Alamar – currently leased to a private company – organized another garbage collection with private businesses in the area. “It’s a collective effort, but we need more support and education on conservation,” one of the volunteers told this newspaper at the time. “People don’t understand that every little gesture counts.”
Complaints about the precarious state of El Chacón have even reached social networks, where neighbors publish photos of the garbage that the sea deposits on the sand. “We can’t go on like this,” an Internet user living in the area recently commented. “I have lived here all my life and have never seen anything so sad. The beach is part of our history and is now disappearing.”
The little beach continues to attract Cojímar’s garbage. The fact that the place is no longer among the sites of tourist interest has condemned it to permanent neglect by the authorities. Defeated in its war against the landfill, like Hemingway’s old fisherman, El Chacón appears to be very unlucky.
Translated by Regina Anavy for Translating Cuba.
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