A more or less detailed analysis of what has been done in the period under evaluation is expected from the accountability of the delegate to his constituents. How the representative of the town handled the complaints, concerns and proposals. How he led his fellow citizens in a critical look at reality and in participation in all issues that have communities as their center.

However, what Invasor has been able to verify, sometimes he moves away towards the vertices of the assembly process: either they are spaces of absolute formality, with reading of very general reports, or they become a catharsis of everything that remains to be done.

At times, the assembly of Circumscription 26, of the Onelio Hernández Popular Council, in Ciego de Ávila, was in each of those “corners”. With a recently elected delegate, Isis Viria Díaz Echarte ─who succeeded the veteran Matilde Jiménez─, the report and the direction of accountability were carried out by the delegate from another neighboring constituency, with more experience, and in charge of advising and sponsor the assembly process of the demarcation.

Accountability was not so much, but rather an enunciation of the challenges faced by the province and the country in the last two years, a scenario where economic conditions (shortages, electricity generation deficit, inflation) were combined with devastating forces and the COVID-19 epidemic.

The work and willingness of colleagues who served as messengers during the confinement were recognized and it was said that among the lines of work is the attention to vulnerable people, dysfunctional families and the battle against social indiscipline. It would have been very valuable for voters to know first-hand how they work on these fronts and what results are obtained.

In memory of those who lost their lives due to the disease, the attendees (far from the total of 175 registered voters) dedicated a minute of silence. It was followed by an applause of gratitude to the doctor and the nurse of the neighborhood, for having put the humanistic sense of their profession before any obstacle of those who presented themselves.

Then the assembly turned to the familiar inventory of proposals. A rosary of complaints already heard and said by the residents of a distribution of buildings that time has wreaked havoc. That is why the problems of filtration of drinking water tanks will “rise” again, which discharge more than they store, and force the turbine to be put on again and again, and that, it is known, is more water and more current and less life for the pump.

"We have already paid for fixes that did not solve the problem," the neighbors alleged and alluded to a specialized and definitive intervention by brigades that master the technique and possess the resources. "And the weeding of the areas that are not in the building? Who veneers them?"

Definitive was also the word used to require possible solutions to the garbage issue. In the area, there are at least three garbage that, with the current collection cycles by the Community Directorate and social indiscipline, keep the community submerged in bad odors, nylon bags and papers at the mercy of the wind.

What was said there will be rewritten in reports and, at some point near the end of the assembly process, it will fall on the summarized list of the main proposals that we have published so many times.

Partly because on this night in December, concluding one of the hardest years in the last two decades, no official from the agencies responsible for the responses made an appearance to, at least, listen.

Then this journalist will remember what she wrote in October 2013 and it will be, unfortunately, as if she had just published it: “I hope the delegate is finally, and as his birth inscription says, a well-oiled pulley that does not lock or squeak. Let the rest of the pulleys move from the bottom up and the continuous movement, not the inertia, will give you the momentum back up and down. Or that instead of verticalisms we are able to build horizontalities, so that the power of the people does not remain halfway between the people and the power”.