Trinidad: Almost 100 Years of Life and Eight Waiting for the Dependency Law

The door of the house, a single-story home in Los Boliches, is wide open, just like before tourism forever changed the urban landscape and economy of this fishing neighborhood with a village feel. From the outside, the living room is visible, and in the corner of the room closest to the street, next to a window, there is an armchair flanked by two tables where Trinidad Cabello, a 99-year-old woman who still retains her clarity, strength, and determination, sits demanding the Andalusian Regional Government enforce the Law on the Promotion of Personal Autonomy and Care for People in Dependency.

When Trinidad was born, Spain was under Primo de Rivera; when she first applied for recognition as a dependent person, Mariano Rajoy and Susana Díaz were governing; and with Pedro Sánchez and Juan Manuel Moreno, she continues to claim her rights. The waiting time for the Dependency Law is likely as surprising as explaining that Trinidad, without having picked up a paintbrush until she was 70 years old and without having attended painting classes, could be the one signing the three large paintings that dominate the living room. "It's naïve painting," she specifies.

When this resident of Los Boliches first applied for her recognition as a dependent person in 2017, at the age of 91. In 2021, at 95, she submitted a request for review due to a deterioration in her condition. She reiterated it a year later after suddenly losing vision in one eye, in addition to suffering from knee osteoarthritis that required her to use a walker and a kidney disease. However, the response from the Territorial Delegation of the competent Ministry of the Andalusian Regional Government was always the same: "Having seen the legal precepts and others of general application, I resolve not to recognize any situation of dependency."

"I'm as well as one can be at this age. It seems that we old people are not of interest. We weren't supposed to last this long"

The resolution changed in February 2024. By then, Trinidad had lost vision in her other eye, and the Andalusian Regional Government recognized her as a dependent person and granted her a home care service of 4 hours a day. 17 months later, she is still waiting for it to materialize and receives no more external help than what the Fuengirola City Council provides: three hours a week spread over two days.

A lifetime in the same house

"I'm as well as one can be at this age, but it seems that we old people are not of interest," she summarizes. Trinidad was born in the house she lives in, so she knows it well enough to move around. "But without sight," she explains, "it's hard for me to go to the bathroom and eat because I don't have the necessary skills, it's not the same as when a person is born blind." On the tables on each side of her armchair, she has everything she needs to limit her movements and not have to ask for anything from those accompanying her: water, tissues, the phone...

Trinidad regrets that the City Council changes "every so often" the woman who does some household chores for her, although she confesses to being lucky to have a "large" family: four daughters and 13 grandchildren. Every night one of them stays overnight at the house with Trinidad, and during the day a daughter brings her food and family visits follow one another.

"My daughters come in the morning, but it's already hard for them, and the grandchildren work or study and have their own lives," the woman states, then affirms with a serenity that chills: "We weren't supposed to last this long." But Trinidad has endured and is heading towards a century of life, despite the fact that when she was born in 1926, life expectancy in Spain did not even reach 50 years. And she does so with enough courage to continue demanding her rights.

War at 10 years old; widowed at 50 and painter and student at 70

Like many of her generation, Trinidad's life is an example of overcoming, although hers might be somewhat special. She experienced the outbreak of the Civil War at 10 years old and became a widow at 50 with four daughters. Although her husband was a local police officer, he also worked some nights in a bakery "so the girls would be decent," so when he died, she was left with "a small pension" and started working as a seamstress. Although she went to school "until she was 14," she doesn't know "if it was because of the war or why" she didn't have a high school diploma and decided to get it at 70 years old. At that age, she also began to paint self-taught, and her good work led her to exhibit several times at the Galileo Center in Madrid, in other places in Spain, and even abroad.