While the date to enable the first beach of the Coastal Protection macro-project is being defined, the tourist servers of that new strip (beach 5), located between 13th and 11th streets of Bocagrande, are uncertain because they do not know what will happen to them. They assure that sales in December decreased because that area is closed, just like beach 4. (Read: Tourist officials threaten to stop Coastal Protection works)
The actors from the beaches in that sector assert that their income was not enough to be able to meet the expenses of January, since at this time they have to buy school supplies and uniforms for their children. In the midst of this uncertainty and after seeking an answer to the apparent silence of the National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (Ungrd), tourism servers have knocked on doors in different entities to obtain answers. (You may also be interested in: New Coastal Protection Beach Not Conforming to Designs?)
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The District Ombudsman, through the Delegate Ombudsman for the Community, Women and Family, will take judicial actions and measures to prevent the “undermining” of the rights of the tourist servers represented in a group of beach workers 5. “They claim their fundamental rights to information, participation and guarantees to the minimum vital. They also ask for other technical guarantees for the use of the beaches and their safety for bathers,” said Marlon Yánez Camargo, delegated representative for the communities.
The official assured that, in the middle of a meeting with the tourist servers, they told him that the date established to open beach 5 is being extended. They say they haven’t been able to work for seven months. “They do not know when they will be able to return to work or if they will be supported with economic compensation, given the impossibility of working in the same conditions due to the foreseeable risk of the contingencies of the work that is carried out when the conditions of the seabed change,” he added. Yanez.
The Delegate Ombudsman for the Community, Women and Family will request support from the recently created Ministry of Equality and will seek to create spaces for socialization for this problem, in order to avoid de facto ways that affect public order.
Cris Jiménez Hernández, who is a masseur in the area, assured that his income has been affected by the closure of the beach: “We are trying to cope with things. We want them to solve the opening of the beach, because now we have to think about the schools, the services… This beach is lonely, for these times we would be earning money, because we are in high season”.
Juan Carlos Monzón, works director of the consortium in charge of the project, also expressed concern at the end of December about the future of the works in the El Cabrero section, which are part of phase 2 of the Coastal Protection project.
“Until that beach is delivered – that of Bocagrande – the tourist servers will not let us continue on the beach that is in El Cabrero. That will be noticeable in a week or two. This week the second spur is finished, when we finish it we have to wait because we have to close to make the breakwater and then fill in the sand,” Monzón said.
“We haven’t been able to work for seven months”: drama of tourist servers