Las cucharas en ponce: Las Cucharas Ponce – El Nuevo Día – Conoce las especies de Puerto Rico

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March 22, 2023
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Las cucharas en ponce: Las Cucharas Ponce – El Nuevo Día

Instituciones – DCR

El Departamento de Corrección y Rehabilitación (DCR) cuenta con 31 instituciones correccionales; dos de las cuales son Centros de Tratamiento Social, para menores. En la región norte hay 14 y 17 en la región sur.

Región Norte

Complejo Correccional Bayamón

787-488-9800

Anexo Seguridad Máxima Bayamón 292

Dirección Física: Carr. #5 Ave. Central Juanita Final, Bayamón, P.R. 00960
Capacidad: 292
Teléfonos: 787-488-9800
787-288-7760 (SUP)
Población: Alberga Sentenciados
Custodia: Máxima

Instituto Educativo Correccional de Bayamón

Dirección Física: Carr. #5 Ave. Central Juanita Final, Bayamón, P.R. 00960
Capacidad: 110
Teléfonos: 787-488-9800
787-338-2583 (SUP)
787-338-2589 (COM)
exts. 2059/1001
Población: Alberga Sentenciada
Custodia: Mínima, Mediana

Centro de Ingresos Diagnóstico y Clasificación 705 Bayamón

Dirección Física: Carr. #5 Ave. Central Juanita Final, Bayamón, P. R. 00960
Capacidad: 705
Teléfonos: 787-488-9800
787-288-7762 (SUP)
787-338-2577 (COM)
exts. 4070/4170/4074/4174
Población: Alberga Sumariados
Custodia: Mínima, Mediana y Máxima

Institución Correccional Bayamón 501

Dirección Física: Carr. #5 Ave. Central Juanita Final, Bayamón, P.R. 00960
Capacidad: 516
Teléfonos: 787-488-9800
787-288-7769 (SUP)
exts. 4006/4003/4026
Población: Alberga Sumariados
Custodia: Mediana y Máxima

Centro Detención Bayamón 1072

Dirección Física: Carr. #5 Ave. Central Juanita Final, Bayamón, P.R. 00960
Capacidad: 1112
Teléfonos: 787-488-9800
exts. 3003/3051/3001
Población: Alberga Sumariados
Custodia: Mínima y Mediana

Complejo de Rehabilitación para Mujeres

Dirección Física: Carr. #5 Ave. Central Juanita Final, Bayamón, P.R. 00960
Capacidad: 374
Teléfonos: 787-488-1300
Población: Alberga Sentenciadas
Custodia: Mínima, Mediana y Máxima

Centro Medico Correccional (CMC)

Dirección Física: Carr. #5 Ave. Central Juanita Final, Bayamón, P.R. 00960
Capacidad: 184
Teléfonos: 939-225-2400
939-285-2401
exts. 3003/3051/3001/1023(SEGURIDAD)

San Juan

Hogar Intermedio para Mujeres

San Juan (HIM)

Dirección Física: Ave. Fernández Juncos Esq. Ramón Power,
Puerta de Tierra, San Juan P.R. 00901
Capacidad: 38
Teléfonos: 787-724-5575
787-724-5211
Población: Alberga Sentenciadas
Custodia: Mínima

Río Grande

Campamento Zarzal

Dirección Física: Carr. #3 Km. 32.9 Bo. Tres T, Río Grande, P.R. 00745
Capacidad: 375
Teléfonos: 787-888-1185
787-888-4116
exts. 201/300
Población: Alberga Sentenciados
Custodia: Mínima

Aguadilla

Institución Correccional Guerrero

Dirección física: Carr. #2 Int. 466 Bo. Guerrero, Aguadilla, P.R. 00603
Capacidad: 1,000
Teléfonos: 787-882-2630
787-882-8334
787-882-8359
787-997-0569
Población: Alberga Sumariados
Custodia: Mínima, Mediana y Máxima

Arecibo

Anexo Sabana Hoyos 384

Dirección Física: Bo Manantiales Sector Jobales, Carr. 628 Km 3.9 Arecibo P.R. 00612
Capacidad: 384
Teléfonos: 787-333-2270
787-878-2204
Población: Alberga Sumariados
Custodia: Mínima y Mediana

Institución Correccional Sabana Hoyos 728

Dirección Física: Bo. Manantiales Sector Jobales, Carr. 628 Km 3.9 Arecibo P.R. 00612
Capacidad: 728
Teléfonos: 787-881-1350
787-879-7562 ext. 230
Población: Alberga Sentenciados
Custodia: Mínima y Mediana

Institución Correccional Sabana Hoyos 216

Dirección Física: Carr. 628 Km. 3 Bo. Jovales Sector Sabana Hoyos, Arecibo, P.R. 00612
Capacidad: 216
Teléfonos: 787-881-5000
787-879-7567
787-879-7560
exts. 222/232/230/240
Población: Sentenciada
Custodia: Mínima

Centro de Tratamiento Residencial de Arecibo

Dirección Física: Bo. San Luis Ave. De Diego, Carr 2 #405 Arecibo P.R. 00612
Capacidad: 75
Teléfono: 787-878-0445
exts. 223/240/221/222
Población: Alberga Sentenciados
Custodia: Mínima

Región Sur

Complejo Correccional Sgto.

Pedro Rodríguez Mateo, Ponce (Las Cucharas)

Anexo Custodia Mínima Ponce

Dirección Física: Bo. El Tuque Sector Las Cucharas Carr. #2 Ponce, P.R. 00731
Capacidad: 192
Teléfonos: 787-843-1120
787-844-0649
787-492-8195
exts. 4010/4011
Población: Alberga Sentenciados
Custodia: Mínima

Centro de Clasificación Fase III Ponce

Dirección Física: Bo. El Tuque Sector Las Cucharas Carr. #2 Ponce, P.R. 00731
Capacidad: 280
Teléfonos: 787-843-1120
787-841-1838
787-492-0451
exts. 4055/4056
Población: Alberga Sentenciados
Custodia: Mínima y Máxima

Centro de Ingresos Diagnóstico y Clasificación 676 Ponce

Dirección Física: Bo. El Tuque Sector Las Cucharas Carr. #2 Ponce, P.R. 00731
Capacidad: 676
Teléfonos: 787-492-2880
787-284-5326
exts. 2499/2511/2003/2004
Población: Alberga Sumariados
Custodia: Mínima, Mediana y Máxima

Institución Adultos Ponce 1000

Dirección Física: Bo. El Tuque Sector Las Cucharas Carr. #2 Ponce, P.R. 00731
Capacidad: 831
Teléfonos: 787-840-0632
787-842-2222
787-841-2280
787-841-2266
787-841-2290
787-841-2480
787-841-1822
787-844-4587
Población: Alberga Sentenciados
Custodia: Mediana y Máxima

Institución Correccional Jóvenes Adultos Ponce 304

Dirección Física: Bo. El Tuque Sector Las Cucharas Carr. #2 Ponce, P.R. 00731
Capacidad: 304
Teléfonos: 787-841-1350
787-259-3847
787-259-3862
787-259-3874
787-259-3875
787-841-1188
exts. 3007/3013
Población: Alberga Sumariados
Custodia: Mínima, Mediana y Máxima

Facilidad Médica Correccional Ponce 500

Dirección Física: Bo. El Tuque Sector Las Cucharas Carr. #2 Ponce, P.R. 00731
Capacidad: 486
Teléfonos: 787-492-0220
787-284-5340
787-284-5104
exts. 224/222/226/231
Población: Alberga Sumariados
Custodia: Mínima y Mediana

Institución Máxima Seguridad Ponce

Dirección Física: Bo. El Tuque Sector Las Cucharas Carr. #2 Ponce, P.R. 00731
Capacidad: 420
Teléfonos: 787-843-1120
787-843-6204
787-492-8163
exts. 2499/2511/2003/2004
Población: Alberga Sentenciados
Custodia: Máxima

Institución Correccional Ponce Jóvenes Adultos 224

Dirección Física: Bo. El Tuque Sector Las Cucharas Carr. #2 Ponce, P.R. 00731
Capacidad: 224
Teléfono: 787-841-8065
Población: Alberga Sentenciados
Custodia: Mínima y Mediana

Institución Correccional Ponce Principal

Dirección Física: Bo. El Tuque Sector Las Cucharas Carr. #2 Ponce, P.R. 00731
Capacidad: 534
Teléfonos: 787-284-7260
787-284-8990
787-841-6201
787-841-6158
787-841-8000
exts. 4027/4044/4031/4028
Población: Alberga Sentenciados
Custodia: Mínima y Mediana

Centro de Detención Salinas

Dirección Física: Carr. #3 KM 150.1 San Felipe, Barrio Aguirre, Salinas Puerto Rico 00751
Capacidad: 132
Teléfonos: (939) 229-1055
Exts. 2000/2003/2004
Población: Masculina de la esfera federal
Custodia: Federal

Centro de Tratamiento Social de Ponce

Dirección Física: Ave. Tito Castro #1047 Carr. 14 Ponce, P.R.
Teléfonos: 787-812-1500
787-840-5652

Centro de Tratamiento Social de Villalba

Dirección Física: Carr. 149 K.58.8 Bo. Tierra Santa Villalba, P.R.
Teléfono: 787-847-5000 / 6009
Población: Alberga menores en Calidad de Custodia (Tribunal de Menores ha entregado su custodia al Departamento de Corrección).
Custodia: Clasificación de la Matrícula Atendida: Alberga menores en Calidad de Custodia (Tribunal de Menores ha entregado su custodia al Departamento de Corrección y Rehabilitación).

Complejo Correccional Guayama

Anexo Guayama 296

Dirección Física: Carr. #3 Km. 142.6 Guayama, P.R. 00785
Capacidad: 296
Teléfonos: 787-864-5893
787-864-6658
exts. 1218/1220
Población: Alberga Sentenciados
Custodia: Máxima

Institución Correccional Guayama 500

Dirección Física: Carr. 3 Km. 142.6 Guayama, P.R. 00785
Capacidad: 516
Teléfono: 787-864-3112
ext. 1515
Población: Alberga Sentenciados
Custodia: Mínima, Mediana y Máxima

Institución Correccional Máxima Seguridad Guayama 1,000

Dirección Física: Carr. 3 Km. 142.6 Guayama, P.R. 00785
Capacidad: 807
Teléfonos: 787-864-5077
787-864-3530
787-864-3840
787-864-3740
787-864-3590
787-864-3690
787-864-3820
787-864-9152
787-864-3500
exts. 2210/2201/2207
Población: Alberga Sentenciados
Custodia: Máxima

Mayagüez

Centro de Detención del Oeste (CDO)

Dirección Física: Carr. 105 Bo. Limón Km 0.9 Mayagüez, P.R. 00681
Capacidad: 546
Teléfonos: 787-265-6600
787-831-2050
787-265-6525
787-265-3925 (SUP)
787-265-3980 (COMA)
Población: Alberga Sentenciados
Custodia: Mediana y Máxima

Jayuya

Programa Agrícola de la Montaña- La Pica, Jayuya

Dirección Física: Carr. 140 Km 2.2 Bo La Pica Jayuya P. R. 00664
Capacidad: 88
Teléfonos: 787-828-4020
787-828-0719
exts. 221/233/240/244
Población: Alberga Sentenciados
Custodia: Mínima

Siguen las muertes en cárcel Las Cucharas en Ponce

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Inter News Service

Ponce, 29 de septiembre de 2022 – Por segundo día consecutivo fue reportado el hallazgo de un confinado muerto en la cárcel Las Cucharas, en Ponce.

La Policía informó que a las 8:01 de la mañana de hoy, se confirmó el fallecimiento de un confinado de 70 años en el complejo correccional Sargento Pedro Rodríguez Mateo. Fue identificado como Carmelo Rodríguez Caraballo, quien había sido ingresado el miércoles por un caso de violencia doméstica ocurrido en el área de Guayama.

El doctor Martínez certificó el fallecimiento.

Los agentes Ángel López, de Homicidios, y Roberto Leandry, de Servicios Técnicos, se hicieron cargo de la investigación junto a la fiscal Limarie Cobián, quien ordenó el traslado del cuerpo a Ciencias Forenses ser sometido a la autopsia de rigor.

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After the Kerensky scandal, Babi and I became very close. I went with her to Las Cucharas, one of the suburbs of Ponce, at least twice a week. We taught the children there to read and write, and sometimes to sew and cook. One day, Babi wrote a letter to the president of Kodak, saying that she had recently opened a new facility in Ponce and asking for twenty Polaroid cameras for suburban children. Very soon she received a polite letter from him, where the president apologized for not being able to give cameras of such high quality, but promised to send twenty Kodak cameras and an additional fifty films for a happy start.

Babi thought it would be very useful to teach the children of the neighborhood to take pictures. She showed them how to photograph, for example, cats that are rummaging through the garbage. Garbage, of course, is not the most attractive thing in the world, but cats are wonderful – because they are full of life, and everything that fights for survival deserves admiration. The neighborhood was full of stray dogs and cats. One hung around the butcher shop, begging for trimmings or bones, after which a dozen of them ran after her, hoping to snatch something for themselves. Babi believed that mongrels were special animals. Three mongrels lived in our house in Ponce: Bore, Bloch and Tsarapych. Their color was chestnut, light and black, respectively, the muzzle is blacker than resin, the coat is scaly. But we loved them very much, and Babi assured me that they were much more loyal than purebred dogs, because she saved them from the city knackers, and they owe their lives to her.

Babi told the children of the neighborhood to photograph the city’s sewers, which carried sewage to the Las Cucharas beach, where the children used to play, because it was an amusement park. The contrast between the smiling faces of the children and the humiliating poverty that surrounded them produced a strong artistic effect. When the film was developed, Babi selected the best shots and sent them to the United States for a contest she had seen advertised in The New York Times, and as a result, the kids from Las Cucharas won first place. Some of the boys went on to become professional photographers and founded Ponce’s first Fine Art Photography School.

Four years after my failure in the play, in 1950, I graduated from the Lyceum in Ponce. In January of the same year, I was accepted to Vassar College, where Babi decided to send me to console me – my ballerina career was over – and I began to prepare for my departure. One evening, Babi and I sat together in the living room, looking at the catalog of the Sers trading house. I chose a beautiful green travel bag with bronze locks, six pairs of silk stockings, three slips, two Scottish wool skirts, a camel hair coat, a pair of rubber boots and an oilcloth cloak, and we entered all this into a pink form at the end of the magazine, where you had to enter everything that you wanted to receive. Ponce stores didn’t sell these things, but thanks to the Sere catalogue, we could buy anything.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Sersa did not have a store on the Island. “Sers” – it was not a place, it was a way of thinking; ordering goods from Sersa was like ordering them from the Lord God. There was no such house in Ponce among the people of our circle, where the Serse catalog would not lie in a conspicuous place. Like most families on the Island, ours was also divided along political lines. Carmita and Carlos were for American statehood, while Babi and I remained staunch supporters of independence. But we all equally loved flipping through the pages of the Sers catalog. To hold it in your hands was already inspiring; it was irrefutable proof that we are part of the United States. We’re not like Haiti or the Dominican Republic, where people didn’t even know what a telephone was and where food was stored in wooden crates between chunks of ice instead of getting GE refrigerators. Thanks to the Serse catalog, we had the same opportunities to purchase modern home appliances as the people of Kansas or Louisiana, and we received all kinds of new inventions from the United States without any additional tax. The cardboard boxes of goods brought in from the North by the steamer were sometimes several weeks late, but when they were opened, the invigorating chill of the United States wafted from there, which fanned the face and penetrated into the soul.

In our house, the Serse catalog was always lying in the living room, on the coffee table, and we leafed through it for hours, dreaming of various wonderful things that we had never seen. When I was little, I once ordered a Madame Alexander doll for Christmas. There were no such dolls in Ponce. We had the most ordinary dolls: a face, arms, legs made of coarse papier-mâché, and a rag body stuffed with cotton. And my Madame Alexander had a face painted with a thin glaze, and her teeth and light brown hair shone like real ones. She arrived in a cardboard box with gold corners, and with it a whole wardrobe, exactly the same one that Babi bought me fifteen years later when she was packing me to the United States.

Carmita ordered a Philips cooker, a Kelvinator washing machine and an Electrolux vacuum cleaner from the Sers catalogue. Carlos enjoyed GE’s electric drills and automatic saw, and dreamed of one day buying a whole case of the cutting-edge tools that Serse offered to woodcarvers. Even Babi sat for hours, immersed in the catalog laid out on her lap. Her favorite part was the gardening section. She read all the information about the rotating water hoses that watered the lawns in front of the houses in Fort Lauderdale; bird feeders from Maine made from real pine bark; about garden furniture from California made of valuable sequoia wood; about the yellow zinnias, orange dahlias, and blue bindweeds from Arizona that couldn’t take root in the tropics, but which Babi ordered through Sere anyway and then planted in our garden because she blindly believed the brightly colored pictures drawn on the bags in who sent the seeds. Sometimes, while flipping through the pages of the Serse catalog, Babi was ready to abandon her freedom-loving ideals and vote for American statehood, as Carmita and Carlos did, but she never decided to do so.

At that time I was leaning towards the idea of independence, perhaps out of solidarity with Babi. But when I saw how contradictory her beliefs were, I didn’t know what to think. Babi wanted the Island to be independent on moral grounds, and I agreed with her. She believed that Puerto Rico was very different from the United States and that asking to be included in the United States as another administrative unit was unfair to Americans, and even more so to ourselves. In a certain sense, we were kind of trying to deceive the American people who treat us so well. But Babi also attached great importance to progress and cherished her American passport as a precious thing.

In Puerto Rico, everyone was sick of politics. We had three parties, and each had its own color: the New Progressive Party, which advocated American statehood, was blue; for Free Associated State and People’s Party it is red, and for independence it is green. Politics is like religion: you can believe either in statehood or in independence, but you cannot have two faiths at once. Some want independence, others, on the contrary, dependency, and those who believe in a free associated state are generally in the clouds. During the elections, the people fell into a hysterical state, and often people behaved in the most wild way.

During the last elections, for example, one independence supporter was killed before a basketball match in the Kanas quarter. Someone jabbed an American flagpole into his back, like a spear, because, you see, he didn’t take off his hat during the Puerto Rican anthem. I can’t stand violence, and this kind of thing terrifies me. That’s why I’m apolitical, I don’t go to vote at all. Perhaps my indecision goes back to when I was a girl sitting in the living room of our house in Ponce with a Serse catalog on my lap, thinking about independence and at the same time dreaming that our island would become part of the modern world.

Many viewed the Free Associated State as something temporary. Perhaps this is really what suits us the most, but not forever. People want to be clear about what it is; they want everything written in black and white, signed and stamped at the bottom of the page. The desire to create a federation is precisely what it means to leave for yourself the possibility of change. Such a political decision is smart and thoughtful, but we will lose confidence in ourselves, we will be afraid that we will cease to be ourselves. And therefore, I am sure that the day will come when we will still have to choose between integration into the United States and independence.

In my mind, the Island looks like an eternal marriageable bride. If one day Puerto Rico becomes one of the American states, the country will need to adopt English, because it is the language of her future spouse, as an official language along with Spanish, and not only because it is the language of modernity and progress, but also because that it is the language of world power today. If the Island chooses independence and decides to remain an old maid, it will also have to make sacrifices and accept poverty and backwardness, it will have to live without receiving any benefits from the United States and any patronage from its side. We will be independent, but we will not be free, because what kind of freedom is there if you are poor. Unfortunately, it is likely that we will fall prey to one of our political caciques, who keep their eyes open from behind closed blinds when the moment comes to usurp power. I have not the slightest doubt that independence will set us back a century and that this will be a huge sacrifice on our part. But how then to remain yourself?

Finally the day came for me to leave for the United States. I carefully packed my new clothes into my Sersa travel bag. Babi accompanied me to San Juan in Grandma Gabriela’s old Pontiac, which took us to Big Island Airport. Tears welled up in my eyes as I said goodbye to her and climbed the gangway of the star of the Pan American, a four-engine plane that would land in Idlewild in five hours. However, I quickly stopped being sad. And when I got to college, I generally felt like a different person.

The four years I spent at Vassar College were the happiest of my life. Fortunately, the Ponce Lyceum taught English from the first grade, so I had no problems with my studies. I liked the college very much: the white gravel paths and weeping willows, and the excellent classrooms for Greek, Latin, and English literature. There I realized that Ponce, which seemed to me almost a metropolis when I lived on Dawn Street, was just a small town.

In the next two weeks, after Kintin discovered the manuscript in Rebeca’s secret drawer, he found nothing new. He did not say a word to his wife about the find, but did not stop thinking about the manuscript. Every morning, before dawn, he would tiptoe into his office with a bronze key in his hand to see if there was anything else, but nothing changed. The cream folder lay in its place, but there were exactly the same number of pages. Two weeks later, when he pulled out the secret drawer, it seemed to him that the folder had become heavier, and indeed there were added three more chapters.
Kintin suspected that Isabel knew that he was reading the manuscript. Everything was too simple: the key was always in the same place, at the bottom of the box. It also seemed strange that Isabel never woke up and complained when he got up in the middle of the night and wandered around the house in the dark that he disturbed her sleep. It was as if there was a secret agreement between them: if neither of them said a word, Isabel would continue to write, and Quintin would continue to read.
When Quintin saw that three new chapters were dedicated to the Monfort family, he breathed a sigh of relief. Hence, it will not be in these chapters; so he doesn’t have to worry about how he appears in Isabelle’s eyes. He was surprised by the persistence of his wife. She wrote the new material without any help from him, because she did not ask him a single question. Style has become lighter; the language in the course of writing the novel acquired naturalness, which surprised him. Isabel became a real writer, she blossomed before his eyes. She especially succeeded in the chapters on Kerensky, they could have been printed separately as a short story. He eagerly read them, catching himself thinking that he was getting aesthetic pleasure.
However, in addition to pleasure, he also felt a vague regret. He also wanted to take place as a creative person. After all, a good historian must have no less originality and no less imagination than a novelist. To be frank, he simply did not have time to realize this side of his intellect. He had to feed too many mouths and take on too many responsibilities. When Rebeca was still alive, he had to feed the entire Mendisabal tribe, including his brother and sisters; then came the turn of the “Imported Delicacies”, and then he had his own children. Like everyone who has a sense of responsibility, he was forced to tighten his belt and take the bull by the horns. He never had the luxury of sitting on the terrace sipping lemonade the way Isabel does, or watching the pelicans scamper in the lagoon and waiting for wonderful thoughts to come to your mind that you want to capture on paper. He has always lived like a hobbled man. To create a work of art was the biggest dream of his life! If only he had time for this…
Still, he can’t be called a loser. He was proud of what he had already accomplished in his life. To become a successful entrepreneur, you need to be brave and not afraid to make decisions that involve a lot of risk. It is also a way to create something. The organization of the company requires order, perseverance, discipline, but, above all, you must be a person. You need to be able to win over the employees, and he knew how – the employees adored him. Many worked at Imported Delicacies for twenty years, and he, helping them earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow and raise their children, tried to ensure that all this time they led a decent life.
He was an honest man: he paid taxes with strict regularity and had a civic consciousness; he was not indifferent to whether the rights of his neighbor were respected. But when he is gone, no one will remember what he did in life. The dust of oblivion will cover his name, and it will turn into a faceless number in a long list of citizens who lived their lives with dignity. His family will receive a decent inheritance, and the rest will go to the government. But Isabel, on the contrary, if the book is ever published, will be remembered as the author of the novel “The House on the Lagoon”, perhaps as the author of a genuine work of art. To leave your mark on art, of course, means to continue and, to some extent, immortalize yourself.
He told himself that he was selfish and that one should not envy his wife and her possible success. But he would have preferred her to be as obscure as he was. Maybe he could still talk her out of publishing the novel. Keeping everything secret is a commendable act of modesty. By writing a book, Isabel will get something that will give meaning to her life, and he is the first to admit it. The book lived in secret from everyone, like a diamond in the bowels of the earth, but this did not make it any less real. Is it really so important to pull her out into the light of God? Publish it? If it remains unpublished, it will become perfect, because then it will be an ideal work. Not to mention that the family’s reputation would be saved and he wouldn’t have to destroy the manuscript. If Isabelle still loved him, she could make that sacrifice. This will be the ultimate proof of her love for him.
Be patient and stop worrying. Instinct told him that it was unwise to press Isabelle now to dare to talk about her book. Her family history is tragic. Mother was subject to a pernicious passion for cards. Her father committed suicide and Carmita sank into a severe depression that drove her to insanity. He has no other way but to wait. Sometimes the best thing is to do nothing, and everything will work itself out.
He read Isabelle’s description of Ponce at the beginning of chapter sixteen and made a small note in the margin: “Don’t you think you’re idealizing the ‘Pearl of the South’ too much? You talk about Ponce like it’s Paris. Ponce is beautiful.” town, but you shouldn’t compare it to San Juan. You have to look at things objectively. Ponce has one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, and San Juan is a metropolis of one and a half million. Of course, the architecture of Ponce is very attractive, and the houses really look like a wedding cake, but you don’t mean to say that it is more significant than Old San Juan, which is truly an architectural masterpiece!”
“You like independent characters,” he added at the end of the next page, “but that doesn’t mean you have to identify with them. You need to take care of yourself: every time you describe someone, your obstinacy rears its head. Perhaps that’s why you enjoyed it so much when you wrote about Rebecca in chapters six and seven. I recognized her: in her youth, mother was distinguished by terrible disobedience; she was too indulged, and she was used to everything being the way she wanted. But then she changed. Dad helped her grow up, and in the end she became an impeccable wife and mother.
“The most authentic thing about your book is the passion for classical ballet,” he continued. – The reader immediately feels it, because the topic captivates you and you write with inspiration. Your Isabel knows by heart the names of all kinds of steps, both those that she has mastered and those that she could master, and she must have read a couple of books on dance theory. Rebeca, or whatever character you pass off as my mother, shared that passion. When Kerensky says to the students, “If you fill yourself with the sound of music, inspiration will come to you one day,” I think I hear Rebecca’s words. 0003
With your permission, I will write here my version of this sad incident. It is very different from yours because it is based on real events. However, does it matter? Because of the confusion that reigns in your manuscript, no one will distinguish the wheat from the chaff: what is true and what is false. For someone who has never lived in Ponce, both versions will seem convincing. The only thing that matters now is the aesthetic side of the story, how the story is told. And I’m going to prove to you that a historian can also be an artist, just like a writer. So I place my bet in this game, and may the truth prevail!”
“Kerensky was a New York Jew and sympathetic to the left. So when he married Norma Castillo and they moved to Ponce, he was given the nickname Red Kerensky. No one would send their daughter to the Ballet School if Kerensky were the director there. But in Ponce everyone knew who the Castillos were; wealthy people in Ponce all know each other. Norma was very popular as a teacher of etiquette and secular behavior; posture and grace of movement is an important part of this science. The school was successful from the start and there was enough money, but Kerensky was unhappy that Norma only accepted girls from wealthy families. He wanted to work with different people so that later he could show his socialist friends that his school was based on democratic principles and accepted children from poor families. It also offended him that the school was known only because of Norma and that people hardly took him into account. That’s why he decided to get his own and set his sights on Estefania Volmer.
I knew Estefania long before you met her, as young people from good Ponce families often went to dances in San Juan. We went to cabarets together and spent months indulging in innocent flirting. Your father, being a Puritan, wouldn’t let you go there, which is why we only met when we were at university. And that’s why you never saw me with Estefania and still didn’t suspect that we knew each other; but it was from her that I heard what really happened then at the Kerensky Ballet School.
I agree with you: Estefania was crazy, but pretty crazy. I liked her, and I can confirm your words: she never wore underwear. There was such a memorable occasion at the Alamares Casino. Estefania was supposed to wear a crown on the queen of the prom, and she chose me as her partner. She was wearing an outfit with a lot of sequins, extremely tasteless, the kind that the Ponce public likes so much. Her skirt was a bell, on a metal frame. When the moment came for the coronation, Estefania climbed the steps of the throne in the back of the hall, holding a velvet cushion on her outstretched arms, where the crown lay. She climbed to the dais, made a deep curtsy to the queen, and then her skirt rose high, revealing the most seductive pink roundness that I have ever seen. The others noticed it too. The men began to whistle and applaud. However, Estefania did not even blush. She smiled coquettishly, put a crown on the queen, secured it with a comb, and hopped down the stairs as if in a few seconds later the orchestra played some music and we started dancing. I never told you about it because I knew – you were friends, and you would be ashamed of her.
One day Arturo and Margo were returning from a party at the Country Club. It was about six in the morning when they found themselves near a recreation park and saw that a circus had set up its tent not far from the park. A pair of lions were dozing in a cage near the river Margot told Arturo that she wanted to take a closer look at them. Arturo immediately said no, but when Margot insisted on something, it was more expensive for herself not to give in. They had only been married for a month, and they still wanted to please each other. They descended the escarpment, passed the Blue Grove, and came to the cage.
Arturo was in full dress, and Margot was in an evening gown with a long train trimmed with lace and gold thread that shimmered in the predawn twilight. When they came closer, they saw a man who was taking out bones and pieces of meat from a bag. It was an employee of the circus who looked after the animals and at that moment fed them breakfast. Margo came very close and watched in fascination as the lions devoured the fresh meat. She had never seen live lions and found them very beautiful. They had huge eyes, and when they ate, the pupils became very narrow and the eyes became like two golden lakes.
Margot asked the attendant to let her feed the lion. He, without thinking twice, agreed. The animals were old and had long been accustomed to eating from his hands. He gave a piece of meat to Margo. Margot came close to the cage and, as if playing, began to call the thin and dirty female with yellow tassels on her ears, who was closer to her. Margot felt sorry for the lioness. The circus treated animals cruelly; who knows how much suffering befell the poor beast? She slowly slipped her right hand through the bars of the grate. Arturo stood next to her, holding her under his left arm and chuckling at her sentimentality. But at the moment when Margo threw a piece of meat on the floor of the cage, the lioness rushed at her. She slipped her paw between the bars, caught hold of the train of Margo’s dress, and yanked it hard—perhaps attracted by the shimmering sequins—trying to pull Margo towards her. For the next few seconds, a terrible fight continued: Arturo pulled Margo towards him, the lioness towards him. Margot screamed with all her might, but the lioness would not let her go. The gimp fastened the fabric, and it could not break in any way. Margot’s right leg, stuck between the bars, turned into a bloody mess.
As a result of this horrendous incident – and not at all due to cancer, as you melodramatically state in your manuscript – Margot Rinser had to amputate her leg. A few weeks later, Margo discovered that she was pregnant. It broke my heart to watch her—a pregnant young woman who had only been married six months earlier—as she walked in the parks of Ponce with her husband pushing her wheelchair in front of him. Arturo never recovered from this injury. He blamed himself for not being able to prevent that accident. He constantly dreamed of Margo holding out a piece of meat to the lioness in her right hand, and he holding her under his left arm and laughing as if it was all a common joke. Therefore, he devoted himself to taking care of her with such obsession, and Estefania grew up as a street child.
The story of what happened between Kerensky and Estefania at the Ballet School is also, one might say, “the voice of the people”; I didn’t learn anything new from it. They were worth each other, and it didn’t take them long to understand it. “What I didn’t know was that you were almost in love with that canal too! It was you who raised the curtain that evening at the theater to let everyone know about the tricks of Kerensky and Estefania! I know, a few months after that, to relieve Norma Castillo divorced Kerensky, you were a witness in court accusing him of sexual harassment, and as a result of your accusation, Kerensky was deported and left the United States.”
Kintin neatly folded the manuscript, marveling at what he himself had written, when he suddenly heard some noise from outside, as if rustling bushes. He hurriedly hid the manuscript in a secret drawer on his desk and quietly walked over to the window. The noise was made by an eagle owl, he hooted belatedly in the nearby bushes, but, seeing Kintin’s pale face outside the window, he glided like a shadow over the water and disappeared. Quintin returned to his former place and sat down again at his desk in thought.
He discovered something new in Isabel’s character. She was in love with Kerensky and hid it. She always swore to him that he was her first love, but that was a lie. To find out that his predecessor was some kind of rogue, a dance teacher, was to rub salt in the wound. Isabel was then almost a girl, but she showed no compassion for poor Kerensky. If everything she said in her book is true, she will ruin her reputation when everyone finds out that it was she who raised the curtain at the La Perla Theater to avenge her kiss with Estefania. At first glance, she was the very innocence, the very innocence, but in the depths of her soul – what a terrible hatred seethed in her! The strength of her emotions, the cruelty of which she was capable, permeates the pages of the novel like a deadly poison. At fourteen, she behaved like a little Medea and, like Medea, used the magical power of words to take revenge on a bow-legged Russian immigrant.

Many of her most capable students went on to careers in the United States and became famous ballerinas; and now balletomanes of Ponce highly appreciate Tamara. But poor Tony Torres seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. He never returned to his Machuelo Abajo and was never heard from again.
18. Vassar College
After the Kerensky scandal, Babi and I became very close. I went with her to Las Cucharas, one of the suburbs of Ponce, at least twice a week. We taught the children there to read and write, and sometimes to sew and cook. One day, Babi wrote a letter to the president of Kodak, saying that she had recently opened a new facility in Ponce and asking for twenty Polaroid cameras for suburban children. Very soon she received a polite letter from him, where the president apologized for not being able to give cameras of such high quality, but promised to send twenty Kodak cameras and an additional fifty films for a happy start.
Babi thought it would be very useful to teach the children of the neighborhood to take pictures. She showed them how to photograph, for example, cats that are rummaging through the garbage. Garbage, of course, is not the most attractive thing in the world, but cats are wonderful – because they are full of life, and everything that fights for survival deserves admiration. The neighborhood was full of stray dogs and cats. One hung around the butcher shop, begging for trimmings or bones, after which a dozen of them ran after her, hoping to snatch something for themselves. Babi believed that mongrels were special animals. Three mongrels lived in our house in Ponce: Bore, Bloch and Tsarapych. Their color was chestnut, light and black, respectively, the muzzle is blacker than resin, the coat is scaly. But we loved them very much, and Babi assured me that they were much more loyal than purebred dogs, because she saved them from the city knackers, and they owe their lives to her.
Babi told the children of the neighborhood to photograph the city’s sewers, which carried sewage to the Las Cucharas beach, where the guys used to play, because it was an amusement park. The contrast between the smiling faces of the children and the humiliating poverty that surrounded them produced a strong artistic effect. When the film was developed, Babi selected the best shots and sent them to the United States for a contest she had seen advertised in The New York Times, and as a result, the kids from Las Cucharas won first place. Some of the boys went on to become professional photographers and founded Ponce’s first Fine Art Photography School.
Four years after my failure in the play, in 1950, I graduated from the Lyceum in Ponce. In January of that year, I was admitted to Vassar College, where Babi decided to send me to console me – my ballerina career was over – and I began to prepare for my departure. One evening, Babi and I sat together in the living room, looking at the catalog of the Sers trading house. I chose a beautiful green travel bag with bronze locks, six pairs of silk stockings, three slips, two Scottish wool skirts, a camel hair coat, a pair of rubber boots and an oilcloth cloak, and we entered all this into a pink form at the end of the magazine, where you had to enter everything that you wanted to receive. Ponce stores didn’t sell these things, but thanks to the Sere catalogue, we could buy anything.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Sersa did not have a store on the Island. “Sers” – it was not a place, it was a way of thinking; ordering goods from Sersa was like ordering them from the Lord God. There was no such house in Ponce among the people of our circle, where the Serse catalog would not lie in a conspicuous place. Like most families on the Island, ours was also divided along political lines. Carmita and Carlos were for American statehood, while Babi and I remained staunch supporters of independence. But we all equally loved flipping through the pages of the Sers catalog. To hold it in your hands was already inspiring; it was irrefutable proof that we are part of the United States. We’re not like Haiti or the Dominican Republic, where people didn’t even know what a telephone was and where food was stored in wooden crates between chunks of ice instead of getting GE refrigerators. Thanks to the Serse catalog, we had the same opportunities to purchase modern home appliances as the people of Kansas or Louisiana, and we received all kinds of new inventions from the United States without any additional tax. The cardboard boxes of goods that the steamer brought from the North were sometimes several weeks late, but when they were opened, an invigorating chill of the United States wafted from there, which fanned the face and penetrated the soul.