By: Santiago Romero, MSc.
Today when you arrive at El Polvorin, what you find is a very young community, so new that every day there are changes for the better, even, there are residents not only from the formerly Chicharrones neighborhood, which in Batista’s time earned the bad comments of an area of pure delinquency and very poor, illiterate and secluded from the so-called “civilization”.

And that happened because of pure racism and discrimination, still latent but reprehensible, and the fact is that in El Polvorin you find all kinds of people today: blacks, mulattos or browns, Chinese, Galicians, Indians, intellectuals, artists, civil servants, doctors, nurses, in short… the “mixture” is complicated in this young community.

Located in the northern outskirts of the city, the community of El Polvorin was until recently a countryside area, then a large field of deposits of materials, isolated and depressing hamlets, a kind of pasture field, a refuge of uncontrolled inventories, prohibited games and others, until finally came the radical transformation and houses of low consumption and rapid construction were built, very practical two-story houses that assimilated both inhabitants of Chicharrones and other places.

The community underwent several changes, from a taxi cab base to sewerage system and connection to the airport highway, the amusement park, the family doctor’s office and the people organized themselves in mass organizations like the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, the Federation of Cuban Women and defense zone.

There, I have many friends and I am proud to see my former students of the Provincial School of Social Workers who majored in Social Communication and are now in full exercise. I trained many of them for more than ten years and today they are the leading the change in El Polvorin; they are the leaders of a much maligned community and that still some unscrupulous people label it as a low society, they attribute false qualifiers such as “danger zone”, of “delinquency” and associated with violence. Nothing farther from the truth.

How nice to see all the generations integrated in the same town, sharing the little they have; direct and substantive communication, which does not profit, nor subtract, it adds and multiplies, it is positioned as a reference of the real identity of the Santiago de Cuba people: roisterer, musical, dancer, oral narrator par excellence, storyteller, cheerful and often indiscreet, inclined to innuendo and innate chronicler like many who tell you the thousands of changes in a short time and proudly repeat the name of their community, El Polvorin.