HAVANA.- The employee of an elegant candy store located on 23rd Avenue, in front of the Coppelia ice cream parlor, in Havana’s Vedado, tries to scare away a woman with two children who usually hangs around the area, asking for money or collecting leftovers left by customers.
“I’m going to call the police if you don’t leave here,” the waiter says and threatens to hit the woman. “Why can’t I be here? The street is not yours. My children haven’t eaten. “We are hungry,” she responds. Some passersby look at the beggars with a certain repulsion.
The scene is observed by the passengers of a private taxi that has stopped at the scene for a few minutes. “We don’t look more and more like Port-au-Prince (Haiti’s capital). The dirty, dark streets and a pile of beggars asking for money or picking things up from the trash. Not even Vedado is safe from this plague,” comments the taxi driver. “I hope you don’t find yourself in that situation,” a woman traveling in the taxi tells the driver.
“My ‘pure’, I am not God to help the destitute. Who is to blame for so much misery? Government. Let them go to the Central Committee of the (communist) Party to demand food,” the driver snaps. Inside the taxi a debate begins. A man believes that “the majority of those who live on the streets are drug addicts or alcoholics. Many were snitches. If they were good people, a family member or friend would help them.”
The meanness in Cuba
Another traveler says that “you have to be careful with that crowd. Sometimes they lend themselves to assaulting you and taking your money. A few days ago, a homeless man (beggar) snatched a bundle of bread from an old woman. The government is the one that should take care of these people. Didn’t Fidel (Castro) make a revolution so that there were no poor people in Cuba? So, let the State help them.”
While activists from independent civil society organizations, community and religious groups take care of the needy on the streets, a segment of Cubans has become unsupportive and selfish. They are indifferent to other people’s problems, even if they are those of their own family.
For Eduardo, 57 years old, self-employed, Cuba is a jungle. “If you get dizzy (worry) you lose. Sometimes I feel sorry for those people who are hungry and in financial need. But if you give them ‘a salve’ (help) they will bother you every day, asking you for food or money. The country is on the brink of chaos. There isn’t even bread anymore. Those who escape (solve) are either because they are pinchos (leaders), they have a bisne (business) or they receive dollars. I only help my family. Screw the rest,” he points out crudely.
Carlos, a sociologist, believes that, in countries with long-term economic, political and social crises, petty behavior emerges in large sectors of the population. “This is the case of Cuba. The ‘conjuncture’, as the government calls the crisis, did not begin five years ago. It is the extension of that crisis that worsened in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and worsened with the disappearance of the USSR in 1991. The Cuban model was never sustainable. It operated in leech mode thanks to subsidies from Moscow and later from Venezuela. The productive fabric has collapsed. Civic values too. “In an alarming percentage of citizens, marginality, lack of decorum and rude attitudes prevail.”
polarized society
“Since 1959, the government fostered popular hatred against those who thought differently. Society was polarized. Fidel Castro designed a model where the State controlled everything, from food to the sale of a television. When foreign subsidies stopped flowing, the regime, to survive, designed a scheme whose objective was to collect the dollars that the so-called ‘worms’ sent to their relatives.”
“The economic and political framework of the government is built on the story of social justice and collective property. Hollow rhetoric. The military elite and the institutional bureaucracy appropriate the surplus value generated by the productive sector and the exports of medical services. An ideological Frankenstein operates in Cuba. They hide behind Marxism, but they practice state capitalism. These synergies created a new class: the olive green bourgeoisie. For its part, the partisan bureaucracy engendered a type of simulator, liar and divorced from reality. These dominant castes live off public money, which pays for their meals and privileges. They do not want to accept that they are the exploiting and impoverishing class of society. The ‘economic package’ is a strategy to modernize the regime’s control and collection apparatus. The government does not subsidize the people, it is the people who subsidize the State,” concludes the sociologist.
Extreme poverty
Sergio, an economist, is convinced that “the new measures are going to increase extreme poverty. According to some studies, more than 80% of the population on the island is poor: they earn a salary that at the current exchange rate is equivalent to between 7 and 30 dollars per month. With the rise in fuel prices, inflation will skyrocket. The dollar is already close to 320 pesos. And it will continue to rise. The government’s response to tackle the fiscal deficit and inflation is to raise prices, taxes and strengthen administrative controls on private businesses. From my point of view it is counterproductive. To attack inflation and the money deficit, they should cut ministries and reduce the gigantic bureaucratic and military apparatus.”
Diana, a social worker, recognizes that the biggest losers from the economic crisis are the elderly. “When we talk about vulnerable in Cuba we are referring to almost the entire population. But the elderly are the most affected. Their pensions were not updated according to current inflation. Of more than one million 600 thousand retirees, 55% earn a checkbook of 1,528 to 2,000 pesos, which is equivalent to 5 to 7 dollars in the informal market. Social assistance is overwhelmed, serving more than 800,000 people throughout the country. And it is insufficient, because given the accelerated deterioration of the situation, I believe that, at this time, two or three million Cubans need financial and material help to overcome poverty. But the authorities say there is no money.”
Niurka, a nurse in a nursing home, points out that “most nursing homes are in a terrible state of construction. Due to low salaries they do not have personnel to care for the elderly. The hygiene, food and living conditions are deplorable.” Emigration, which is estimated at between 7 and 8 percent of the population in the last ten years, has contributed to many elderly people finding themselves without filial protection.
“There are elderly people who authorize their relatives to sell the house and with the money they can pay for the trip to another country. But sometimes the relatives sell the house without counting on them and leave them on the street. It also happens that families with a good economic status, they abandon their parents and pay to be admitted to an asylum, knowing that they are real dens,” confesses nurse Niurka.
The shortcomings in Cuba affect a professional and a worker equally. Every time the peso, the national currency, is devalued, millions of Cubans border on extreme poverty.
