A story with radioactive waste

It’s a story related to the ambitions of Bureau 2 [Elena Ceaușescu] and Bureau 1 [Nicolae Ceaușescu] to obtain foreign currency. The foreign currency hunger of the 80s, I lived that story, it’s a true story. And then, out of the foreign currency hunger, from what I understand, the Securitate arranged through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to receive chemical waste and store chemical waste on Romanian territory. In Sulina there was the Sulina Free Port, a delimited area inside the city of Sulina, where goods could be handled without customs duties. So those goods did not enter Romanian territory from a customs point of view. And then some cans, some tin barrels actually arrived, I think 100 liters and 200 liters on a ship, they were unloaded in the Sulina port and placed in some cargo warehouses somewhere on the left bank of the Danube, in an area that belonged to the free port. For a few years they sat there quietly and as was the tradition during the Ceausescu era, people started stealing from those cans. Inside were some substances that looked like paint, yellow and brown, reddish-brown, I think those were the 2 colors and since there was a very big crisis of any raw material, it was a godsend. Including public buildings were painted with those paints. After a while I understood that the Western press leaked the information that the Romanian Government was hiding toxic waste, chemical waste. An international scandal broke out, which is why Bureau 1 and Bureau 2 immediately disavowed this story. Scapegoats were sought. I know that at that time it seems to me that the general director and the deputy director did a little prison time, and the accountant from the Free Port did a little prison time because they colluded with the political opponent in the West and things like that. A ship with no name came. So that’s what I remember because at that time you didn’t really have much fun in Sulina. That’s what we were here, at the end of the world. Any rumor and any novelty was immediately dissipated among us and we all went to see the ship without a name. It was something absolutely, absolutely new and absolutely strange. And we all had to see this novelty. I remember it even now. It had gray siding and where the name should have been was painted grayer, a little grayer. Those barrels were loaded on board and off it went.