Old Havana’s Museum of Metalwork is home to soaring colonial archways, floors of gleaming artworks and five of the world’s luckiest street dogs.
In the heat of the day, Vladimir, Canela, Aparicio, Leon and Carinoso sprawl in the grand entrance of the centuries-old stone building. At night, the animals patrol the streets with local police or sleep under the museum’s grand stairway. Each wears a collar with a tattered card bearing its name, photograph and the words: “I live in the Museum of Metalwork.”
More than a dozen state institutions ranging from Cuba’s central bank to a public toilet have taken street dogs under their wings in recent years, assigning them official IDs, and housing and granting them year-round medical care and protection from the city dogcatcher, animal protection officials say.
“I don’t like dogs, but I’ve really developed a soft spot in my heart for them,” said Yarisbel Perez, a guard at a historic building overlooking Old Havana’s Plaza Vieja, where two sets of guards share custody of P9 and Nina, the former named after a city bus line.
Despite the trappings of state protection, the roughly two dozen former street dogs enjoy, at most, a quasi-official status, conveyed by the frequently thin pretext that they are working security.
Cuban law banning animals from workplaces contains an exemption for guard dogs and this legal cover for the ex-strays was bolstered when a dog at a government office in eastern Havana awakened a guard one night by barking when it heard someone trying to remove air conditioners from the windows, said Nora Garcia, president of the Cuban Association for the Protection of Plants and Animals.
“There was a public ceremony in which the dog received an award for saving the air conditioners,” Garcia said.
However, the adoption of street dogs by some of Havana’s most illustrious institutions is driven mostly by the guards’ love of animals and their desire for company on long shifts in a city with little crime.
Dogs in Old Havana benefit from the presence of dozens of state restaurants that donate leftovers to the animals, some of which have grown nearly obese. The dogs with Perez enjoyed an enormous dinner of half-eaten pork chops and leftover chicken and rice served on grease-soaked paper plates from a nearby restaurant.
“They don’t eat bones,” said Victoria Pacheco, a guard in the metalwork museum. “They eat cold cuts, mincemeat, hotdogs and liver.”
The animal protection society maintains a list of 21 dogs living in state institutions, including a Communist Party gas station, offices of the Cuban Journalists’ Union and a mechanical workshop of the Ministry of Public Health.
“They stay here and nothing happens to them,” said Dalia Garcia, the caretaker of a public bathroom in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood that is home to two former street dogs. “Everyone takes care of them, no one hits them. They don’t bark and they don’t bite anyone.”
Other dogs have not been so lucky, including a group snatched by the dogcatcher from Havana’s University of Arts while their student protectors were home on vacation, Garcia said.
“They’re official for us, but the state doesn’t always look so kindly on them,” she said. “When they come and say there can’t be any dogs here, they have to go.”
Similarly sad fates await street dogs who are not chosen for special treatment by state workers, including some of the dogs who wander, matted and skinny, through groups of quasi-official dogs on the streets of Old Havana.
“Sometimes we feel bad and we give them something to eat,” Perez said. “But if we start taking care of all of them, it would get to be a zoo around here.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
RSS