Susan’s Notes
By Susan Palmes-Dennis
ROCKINGHAM, North Carolina—We’ll talk about the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte-Carpio later on but first let’s discuss about Cagayan de Oro City Mayor Rolando ‘Klarex’ Uy’s plans to revive the Night Cafe in downtown Divisoria.
Specifically, Mayor Klarex wants the Night Cafe held in the re-opened Divisoria Park or El Pueblo A Sus Heroes Park that was renovated under the Project Lunhaw initiative for Cagayan de Oro City. When I first heard about it, I immediately wondered how another Night Cafe in Divisoria would impact on the daily traffic rush in the city’s downtown area. Traffic and pollution were among the biggest complaints that arose out of the original Night Cafe.
I had to verify through Google Search when the original Night Cafe opened and while there were some Facebook pages that said it opened in 2004, an AI search yielded the year of launching at 2003. At the time of launching, it did enjoy popular local support because it provided a venue for small and not so small food businesses to sell their wares to the public but to the detriment of nearby food outlets in Divisoria who had to compete for customers.
The former councilor Zaldy Ocon had a point then when he questioned why it was called a Night Cafe when there was not a single cup of coffee sold in the site. I always maintained that it should have been called ‘Night Bistro’ because of the kind of food and drink sold there but a casual Google Search validates my observation.
Aside from coffee, cafes sell light drinks and pastries and are usually open in the morning. Bistros offer more casual, hearty food and are open during lunch and dinner hours. Granted there’s a ‘Night’ that precedes the cafe title, but you know what I mean. When one speaks of cafes or even bistros, one usually thinks of or associates it with the street cafes and bistros in Paris, France, in Milan, Italy and New York in the US and in other First World countries.
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Those European cafes and bistros have an aura of class that cannot possibly be compared to the Divisoria Night Cafe in Cagayan de Oro City. Later in the early mid 2000s, they even combined the Night Cafe with a Night Market that was populated mostly by out-of-towner Muslim small business owners in nearby Agusan provinces and in Misamis Oriental.
The traffic congestion in the Divisoria area at the time was horrendous to say the least. And while City Hall’s sanitation crews are kept busy cleaning up the mounds of garbage left behind by both the stall holders and customers at the end of every Night Cafe—scheduled every Fridays and Saturdays from 6 pm to 2 am—what’s being sold actually is not coffee as the cafe title implied, but liquor and mineral water.
Yes, liquor like the local Tanduay Rhum, San Miguel and Red Horse beer sold in every barangay eatery (carinderia) in the city and patronized by every unemployed tambay (bum) who looks for every excuse to drink at any time of the day and doesn’t care about raising their own families. On second thought it should not have been called Night Cafe but Night Eatery or Night Carinderia because that is basically what it was.
The former Night Cafe had rows of stall owners smoking barbecued pork, chicken and seafood in Divisoria and selling liquor and soda to city residents and visitors wanting a cheap local alternative to the pricier cafes, restaurants and even fastfood outlets. Nothing wrong with catering to the masa or kabus but turning the historic Divisoria site again into one giant urinal cum carinderia is not the way to go for City Hall’s chief developers.
I understand that City Hall under the Klarex administration wants to revive the Night Cafe but if ever they push for its revival, I suggest they should look for cooperation and mass support not just from the general public but from the stakeholders that will be directly affected by it. If they’re looking for some local inspiration, the Sugbo Mercado in Cebu City’s IT park area should provide a useful reference point for City Hall planners.
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I’m still against the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte Carpio but as things now stand, the wheels are already in motion for the trial to commence on or even before the July 6 date scheduled by former Senate president now plain Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano. And unless they somehow managed to secure the numbers, they will be hard pressed to stop the machinery from moving on with a new Senate president and a new presiding officer for the trial.
As I write this, the Senate leadership ordered more police security in response to reported threats of a coup d’ etat by destablizers out to unseat President Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr. Given last month’s shooting incident that allowed fugitive Sen. Ronald ‘Bato’ dela Rosa to escape for parts unknown, the move to secure the Senate is not only understandable but expected.
That said, the coup threat or any threat of violence should not give cause to cancel the trial unless there are valid legal grounds to do so. The biggest issue aside from her supposedly threatening the President are the multi-billion peso bank transactions that she and her husband Manases Carpio reportedly incurred for several years.
The transactions were reported by the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) based on the reports submitted to them by the banks which recorded the transactions. If such records were opened during the impeachment trial and the AMLC’s findings confirmed, then public sentiment on VP Sara, which had been polarized owing to her family’s political influence, may dramatically shift. But that is another story for another day.
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