- HOLGUIN, Cuba (AP) - For
Rebeca Falla, it's getting harder and harder to chill out.
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- Eastern Cuba's worst drought in 40 years has turned cooking,
washing clothes and scrubbing floors into a housewife's nightmare.
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- Then there's showering. Falla, 59, is accustomed to taking
long, cold ones twice daily for relief from the humid 90-degree weather,
but has to settle for a brief drizzle. "It leaves you in a very bad
mood," she says.
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- The water shortage has affected thousands in Holguin
city, 435 miles east of Havana in the area hardest hit. Surrounding towns
in Holguin province and the eastern provinces of Camaguey and Las Tunas
have also suffered.
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- Yucca, banana and sugarcane crops have withered away,
spiking up prices in local markets. Nearly 13,000 bony cows have been slaughtered
this year.
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- Authorities went on alert in Holguin, Cuba's fourth largest
city, in July 2003, when rain failed to fill reservoirs. Two months later
one of the city's three reservoirs dried up, then another in May when rainfall
was 40 percent below normal.
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- "Never before have two reservoirs dried up,"
said Leandro Bermudez, Holguin's deputy director of Cuba's National Institute
of Hydraulic Resources. "It's been very tense here."
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- Although things have improved lately with more frequent
rain showers, it will be weeks before reservoirs and wells are replenished.
The reservoir that dried up in May has recovered only enough to guarantee
30 days of water for hospitals and clinics in Holguin, a city of 300,000.
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- Faucets run empty, and most wells dried up long ago.
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- Still, in communist Cuba, social solidarity is deeply
ingrained, and the few remaining people with water on their property open
wells and hoses to neighbors.
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- "They have never turned anyone away," Idalia
Gongora, 43, said as she and her daughter filled buckets from her neighbors'
well. "Thank goodness, they are very charitable people. If not, we
would have suffered much more."
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- Cuba's centralized government reacted rapidly, digging
more than 100 new wells in and around Holguin and setting up dozens of
stores selling drinking water for two Cuban cents a liter. With the Cuban
peso trading at 26 to the U.S. dollar, that's far less than an American
penny.
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- Government trucks and tractors were converted into water
carriers. About 115 cruise this city delivering water. It's free but mostly
nondrinkable.
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- One recent evening, dozens of people surrounded one water
carrier, as high-spirited as children around an ice cream truck, filling
plastic and metal containers, even garbage cans.
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- One man who returned repeatedly was teased by a neighbor,
who shouted: "Mario's family appears to be growing by the minute!"
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- If deliveries don't meet demand, entrepreneurs with makeshift
trucks and a special government permit fill the gap, also at two U.S. cents
a liter.
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- In the Vista Alegre neighborhood of Holguin, the community
council rallies about 30 people at 8 a.m. to plan the day - organizing
truck routes to every block, making sure clinics and bakeries get what
they need, deploying volunteers who work as late as 9 p.m.
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- "We spend more time here than in our own homes,"
said Gloria Asencio Galvez, the acting council head.
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- Holguin residents await the opening of a $5 million,
34-mile pipeline from the Cauto River in southern Cuba. Water is supposed
to start flowing on Aug. 31 and fill half the city's daily needs. But it
won't reach the countryside, where the economic pinch is sharpest.
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- Farmer Rafael Aguilera, 55, sitting on his porch 12 miles
south of Holguin, said the daily yield from his skinny cows has fallen
from four gallons a day to less than two pints. All the milk now goes to
his 8-year-old son.
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- Aguilera lost his corn crops, and there's little drinking
water. Parched, brittle land stretches out all around.
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- "Nothing makes it to us out here," said Aleda
Hernandez, Aguilera's wife. "We're off the map."
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