Aniplant Headquarters

ANIPLANT HEADQUARTERS

Aniplant maintains its headquarters at 128 Principe Street in Central Havana. It used to be on the eighth floor of a building with a non-working elevator. I first saw it on my second trip here, and we were all winded by the time we got to the top. During that trip, Nora told us that in Cuba you can’t buy or sell your home. You can only arrange trades between properties. But those trades have to be documented by legal paperwork. In the Cuban “paradise” legal work is free, but it is also in very short supply. Nora had indeed found someone who would trade his home in a central area on the first floor for her HQ on the eighth floor. But she had been waiting four years for her legal project to come to the top of the lawyer’s pile. We found out that a little monetary encouragement would move the matter to the top, and the transaction completed in a couple of days.

Months later I asked her how the new HQ was progressing, and she told me a tale of woe that was hard to understand. It seems the old resident of the Principe property had stripped everything when he left. Even the electrical switches were removed from the walls. She didn’t have the resources to bring it up to a useful space. It was just overwhelming, so we decided to help. On the next trip, we gave her money to fix the place up, and the work began. Still, even a year after that, she was nowhere close to finished. By this time (late 2008), she had enough money resources to get the work done, but the project was clearly on tropical standard time, which suggests it might never be completed. We set a goal to have it done for the November 2009 trip, but when I saw it, I had no idea how well Nora and her group had finished the project.

Every part of the place was painted freshly, and all missing electrical and water piping had been replaced. The front room, a large meeting room had beautiful framed color photos of street dogs of Havana, and two new chandeliers lit the room. The outside passageway to the kitchen area in the rear was also painted, and decorated with hanging tropical plants. The second room, behind the meeting room is to be a veterinarian’s office, and it was painted and furnished. It looked like the vet was ready to set up shop. Two rooms behind the vet’s office were not finished because they contain building materials, and Nora told me of her plans to build a second story over them and beneath the 16 foot ceilings. Every door had a gate of grating on it, so the HQ dogs (eight of them) could be confined wherever they wanted them.

As I was walking around amazed at how much they had accomplished, the dogs were let loose, and we were overcome with a pack of the happiest, barking animals you can imagine. I could immediately spot Aló Presidente, the black dog we had rescued from the streets in 2007. He was the happiest of all of these lovable canines. Well, he should have been, seeing as how he was the only male in the group of eight. Well, such matters are not what you might think, as of course all the HQ dogs are neutered. Aló is not really the boss of the group, however, because there is a large female who seems to call all the shots in the group. Needless to say, the tremendous progress at the headquarters made me feel that everything we and Nora and her volunteers had done was really working, and that Aniplant has a bright future.

Les Inglis

(See lots more about Cuba and its animals on our new website: http://theaniplantproject.org )