Francisca Picasso spends the day in the cool, sitting on her walker at the door of the block of flats where she has lived for more than half a century.
She comes in handy because, based on greeting each other, she sells the clandestine lottery with which she completes her meager widow's pension.
Also because, even on hot days like today, the exterior seems less suffocating and claustrophobic than its extremely poor 48-meter ground floor, low ceilings and three bedrooms with windows onto an interior patio where dandelions filter the light.
This 89-year-old woman from Cádiz is one of the 70 residents of the Cerro del Moro neighborhood, who have been locked up in apartments that the Franco regime built as temporary emergency accommodation for 66 years.
Almost half of that wait has disappeared entangled in broken promises and bureaucracy with a Junta de Andalucía that admits the "deception" in the past and promises to be on the way to solving it.
But Picasso is not very sure that he will live to tell the tale.
“I'm already going to the pine box.
Who knows if I see it ”, interjects the old woman with black humor.
The desperation that excites some and fills others with skepticism is domiciled at numbers 1, 3 and 5 of Trafalgar Street and 2, 4, 6 —where Picasso lives— and 8 of Battle of Callao, in the middle of Cerro del Moro , a neighborhood marked by need and that still shakes off the stigma of drugs that led to its worst face in the eighties and nineties.
There, the 70 families have been “stranded, frozen in time”, as Cadelaria Grimaldi, president of the Claridad del Cerro del Moro neighborhood association, summarizes.
When she came to office, in 2014, she decided to champion a fight that had already been entangled for decades "in broken promises."
“We have been hearing the same thing for years, that our houses were the following, but here we are still”, summarizes Gloria Vega,
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While Vega - 52 years old and living in a small apartment with her 23 and 20-year-old children - recounts the ailments of chronic humidity, plumbing or electricity problems, she receives a message in the WhatsApp group 'Neighbors group San Fermín' .
"Look, it's the chocolate bars in a pantry gnawed by one of the rats from the blocks," says the woman while she shows the photo on her mobile.
One more test for Grimaldi: “It is what I then send to the Board.
I call and look for whoever is needed, be it Sunday or a holiday.
They have to listen to us."
The name of the chat is a historical nod to the origin of all the problems of the residents, reflected in one of those typical Francoist plaques decorated with a yoke and arrows that appears on the side of one of the affected housing blocks.
“National Union Delegation.
San Fermin Group.
70 houses.
Year 1956″, reads on a tombstone that, for months, has had another message added in the form of a banner: “30 years waiting, Junta de Andalucía.
7th phase already!”.
In the midst of Franco's developmentalism in the 1950s, the National Trade Union Delegation quickly built a neighborhood from scratch to house Cadiz residents who lived crowded in slums —known in Cadiz as “partiditos”— in the center or in situations of poverty.
Just outside across the train track from back then, entire blocks of emergency housing sprang up, most of it for rent.
"It was temporary, made of poor materials," recalls Marco Antonio Barciano, treasurer of the neighborhood association.
The transition started, the State of the autonomies began to walk, the Board assumed the competences in housing and became the manager of the blocks.
For many of the residents of Cerro del Moro, the year Expo 1992 became the beginning of the end of their problems.
Since then,
the Board built up to six phases.
The seventh and eighth that fully affected the 70 desperate neighbors fell asleep in a drawer.
Francisca Picasso gets excited along with the president of the neighborhood residents' association, Candelaria Grimaldi, thinking that she will not live to see the promised homes."JUAN CARLOS TORO"
From the outset, his case was different because his houses in these years have gone from renting to ownership.
At the beginning of the 2000s, the Board offered them to buy their homes for amounts less than 20,000 euros, which they paid in small installments to the Administration.
The vast majority bought without hesitation.
Grimaldi believes that the agreement was flawed beforehand, because "those apartments were not in a position to be sold."
The offer became a poisoned candy in the form of bureaucratic procedures that the Andalusian Socialist Administration did not seem very determined to resolve until 2018, despite the fact that it announced the imminent construction project of the new blocks that year.
Or so at least says the acting director of the Andalusian Housing and Rehabilitation Agency (AVRA) in Cádiz, Juan Jesús Bernal:
“The Board has been misleading them for 30 years.
I confirm our displeasure.
Until 2018, they have been counted milongas.
When the new directors [of the PP government and Ciudadanos] took office that year, they found that there was nothing.”
When the current team got down to business, four years ago, they found legal gibberish, compounded by 66 years of waiting for families that have been changing generations and needs since 1956. “We are having to negotiate with 17 banks with right to credit, 17 inheritances and adapt to the current reality of the 70 neighbors”, summarizes Bernal.
In Picasso's house there were first seven people, the couple and their children.
Years later, his daughter, his son-in-law and her granddaughter lived in the bedroom that today belongs to the old woman and in which there is barely room for a bed and a wardrobe.
“In winter, the wall turns black from the humidity.
In summer, the heat is unbearable”, summarizes the neighbor.
The last stumbling block for the San Fermín group has come from the need to subdivide the plot of land on which the future homes of the neighbors will be built.
The procedure will need to go through the plenary session of a City Council, whose mayor, José María González,
Kichi
,
so much delay in a debate poisoned these days to accounts of a city of Justice that the Board should build near those floors and that has now left in the air is ugly.
All in all, Grimaldi now wants to believe in regional progress and gives "a vote of confidence" to the Board.
Bernal even assures that the financing of 10.6 million euros that the last phase will cost is tied up in different programs and budget items, executable in different annuities: “We are going in perfect terms.
I don't know when we'll start laying the bricks.
The intention is to run as much as possible.
I will only say that the Ecovivienda program —one of those that they want to use— must have the work executed in July 2026″.
Gloria Vega no longer knows what to believe.
She shares a bedroom with her daughter and recently suffered a stroke that forced her to move in with her parents for a while, because she couldn't climb the stairs.
"When he was a child, my son dreamed of a patio to play in his new house, now it will be his children who do it," interjects the woman, before leaving to take care of her sick father.
On a Friday in mid-August, life goes on in the street of Battle of Callao.
Three neighbors chat angrily because, after telling their case in the
Diario de Cádiz, trolls
Anonymous have criticized a photo in which a plasma is seen in a room.
“What do they think?
That because I am poor I have no right to live and ask for what is mine?
I do not ask for alms, but what belongs to me”, she snaps angrily, before leaving.
Francisca Picasso, already collected and about to eat lunch, doesn't even feel like sulking.
She gets in the mood for so much waiting until she, sitting on her bed, breaks excitedly on Grimaldi's shoulder: “Oh!
Let's see if they give us the little house, I don't want to die here”.
A neighbor, with the banner in the background, complains about the state of the pavement in Cerro del Moro. "JUAN CARLOS TORO"
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