HAVANA. – After four in the afternoon, Fraternidad Park, in the heart of Havana, Cuba, it is a hive of people. A row of unoccupied pedicabs waits for a passerby to rent them.
In front of the old Ten Cent on Monte Street, dozens of private taxi drivers are hunting for clients. A bald, burly man, owner of an old Soviet-era Moscovich, tries to convince a man loaded with bags that 2,000 Cuban pesos for a ride to the door of his house – equivalent to just over 7 dollars at the market exchange rate. informal – it is not an abusive price.
“My brother, those are the prices that the ‘conjuncture’ ship brought,” the taxi driver justifies himself and adds: “I have to pay a liter of gasoline at 500 pesos and a pound of pork or black beans at the same price. . It’s crazy. I can give you a discount of 300 pesos. No more,” he insists.
His interlocutor does not give in. “From here to La Víbora is less than six kilometers. You are squeezing, asere.” And choose to take a collective taxi or have a road bus appear. Impossible. The tumult is enormous every time an ‘almendrón’ appears. Dejected, he sits on a park bench, next to the old Aldama Palace, and like many Cubans, he vents to anyone who will listen.
Country is not normal
“This country is not normal. These people (the regime’s bosses) have to realize that they are idiots. They don’t know how to manage the economy. I would pay for a lifetime retirement on an island in Greece. Or that they establish a monarchy like in Spain, if they like power so much. But let them go, for the love of God, there are a lot of people who are hungry,” and he begins to tell his story.
“For Christmas, a friend who lives in the United States sent me, through one of those agencies that sell food to Cuban emigrants, 15 pounds of pork for Christmas, a bottle of oil and another of cider and oil and 50 dollars so that he could buy nougat and grapes. He was like the cockroach Martina not knowing what to spend the money on. You know how things are in Cuba. One has a lot of problems at home and wants to stretch the money. In MLC stores, a nougat cost between 4 and 5 dollars. MSMEs sell it between 700 and 800 pesos, which, at the exchange of one dollar for 270 pesos, was more profitable for me. I sold the 50 dollars, they gave me 13,500 pesos. The money evaporated immediately, on items that were priorities. In the end I couldn’t buy nougat and much less grapes, since a bunch cost more than 11 dollars in foreign currency stores. I arrived home with 170 pesos. At least I have pork for dinner on the 24th and wait for the new year,” confesses the man.
Luisa, 55 years old, a high school teacher, does not plan to celebrate Christmas Eve. In her dilapidated Haier refrigerator she only has water knobs, two pounds of croquette dough and a 500-gram package of ground turkey with soy. “Until 2020, for better or worse, we celebrated Christmas as a family. But when the government implemented the ‘Ordering Task’, inflation skyrocketed and everything changed. I have no desire to put the tree in the living room. So that? “If we don’t have food or money to celebrate Christmas.”
The worst thing, considers Julio César, architect, is not that we will not even have chicken for Christmas and the end of the year. “The terrible thing is that you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. When you think you’ve hit rock bottom, we continue to fall into the abyss. 2024 looms as an even darker year for Cubans. Government officials have a hard time all the time “, meeting and raising slogans. They do not offer solutions while the country sinks. If international organizations do not declare an SOS, we are in danger of disappearing as a nation.”
Don’t watch the news
A Havana psychologist told DIARIO LAS AMÉRICAS that she recommends her patients not watch the news or read the state press and thus avoid becoming depressed. “More than 80 percent of Cubans live in poverty, including professionals. The food deficit also affects people who receive remittances. You eat what you can, not what you want. There is no coherent State plan to stop inflation and the brutal economic and systemic crisis. The government’s way out is to make more propaganda and talk about ideology among a citizenry fed up after 65 years of unfulfilled promises. It is counterproductive, in that state of shock, for people to read the Granma newspaper or watch the television news where reality is distorted. I recommend to my patients that, to avoid stress, they rent enjoyable series and films.”
Luis Alberto, a metal worker, agrees with the expert that the regime’s narrative seems “a fairy tale from another country that is not Cuba. It is a reality parallel to what the population lives. The ministers are so incapable that not even the most competent CIA agent would do more damage than this government. Due to the crisis, I have not worked for three years and receive a salary of 3,000 pesos per month (a little more than 11 dollars), which I use to pay for electricity, buy bread and some food. Everyone on the street is talking about the same thing: Cuba has to change or there will be a North Korea-style famine. The only ones who do not realize the disaster are the rulers. All fat and with the necks of fatted bulls who, without shaking their voices, ask you for more sacrifice and ‘creative resistance.'”
With two weeks left until the end of 2023, a feeling of disappointment and anger is perceived on the street. Except in luxury hotels and private businesses to which most Cubans do not have access, there are no Christmas lights or decorations in the capital.
Havana seems to have suffered a bombing. Garbage dumps with swarms of mosquitoes, cockroaches and rats overflow the corners. The dirt on the doorways, the soot on the facades of unpainted buildings and destroyed streets, are today still photos in the neighborhoods.
Joel, a communal worker, does not believe there will be an improvement in the short term. “Most garbage trucks are broken or there are no spare parts. The State allocates us only 30 percent of the fuel we need to clean up the city.”
There are no resources or fuel. People have to wait three or four hours to board a crowded bus or have to carry the coffin to bury their loved ones, because the situation is equally chaotic in urban transportation, funeral services and ambulances in polyclinics and hospitals.
The country is bankrupt. The economy, the regime announced, will decrease between one and two percent. The plan of many Cubans continues to be to leave the country. Those who cannot emigrate live off what ‘falls off the truck’ or on the help of relatives and friends abroad.
In a sad, gray and rainy December 2023, few talk about Christmas. And even less about the future, which has become a bad word in Cuba.
