February 6, 2019
Dear Friends and Family,
This is Segment 14 of the series on Socialism. In this segment you can get a feel for what life is like for an ordinary citizen in a communist/socialist country, in this case Cuba. All of the excerpts come from a book entitled Havana Real. The author is Yoani Sanchez who was born and raised in Havana, Cuba and continues to live there today. In 2007 she established a blog. The excerpts in this segment are from a series of blogs running from 2007 through 2010.
My Takeaways:
In Segment 13, it was reported that Cuba ranked fourth among the 20 Latin America Republics in per capita income before Fidel Castro took control of the government on January 1, 1959. At that time its per capita income was 90% as high as Italy, far higher than Japan, and six times higher than India. Further, Cuba’s President, Fulgencio Batista, was successful in making the island a highly profitable tourist mecca. As a result, from 1950 to 1959, overall national income jumped 22% and 10-30% of Cuban workers were covered with health and medical insurance for the first time. Upon takeover, Fidel Castro instituted Communism/Socialism.
I can personally attest to Cuba’s prosperity before the takeover, as I lived on the eastern part of the island in Santiago de Cuba from April 1957 to March 1958 as a teenager. My father had been transferred there by his employer Texaco to participate in the startup of a new oil refinery to produce finished gasoline from Venezuelan crude oil. At the time, the U.S. heavily taxed imported crude oil but not on imported finished gasoline, hence why the refinery was located in Cuba. Living there, I only noted five things of significant difference than living in the U.S.
Other than those five aspects, life was not significantly different than in the U.S. – housing was quite modern, services were available, food was plentiful (particularly fruits and vegetables), censorship was alleged but we never experienced any. Motels and restaurants were relatively new and the infrastructure of the city appeared to be sound (except for the power outages). I played baseball with the Cuban workers at the refinery, rode the bus downtown to go to the movies (sometime a bit hard to hear as the movies were all in English with Spanish sub-titles so the audience talked a lot during the film), and we frequented a nearby ocean beach.
The revolution was primarily over the graft and corruption of the Batista regime. My father experienced a bit of that when as chief accountant of the refinery he had to appear before a group of Batista officials to receive Texaco’s tax bill. The head official in front of several other officials openly told him, your taxes are this amount but if you write me a personal check for this reduced amount, we will consider the tax bill paid. Of course, the company paid the full amount to the government.
Next:
Segment 15 through 18 will focus on China. Segment 15 will analyze China under Strict Communist rule with Mao Zedong as Chairman of the Communist Party of China (CPC). The time frame is between 1949 – 1976 and the excerpts will focus primarily on two major socialist/communist initiatives – The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
This is Segment 14 of the series on Socialism. In this segment you can get a feel for what life is like for an ordinary citizen in a communist/socialist country, in this case Cuba. All of the excerpts come from a book entitled Havana Real. The author is Yoani Sanchez who was born and raised in Havana, Cuba and continues to live there today. In 2007 she established a blog. The excerpts in this segment are from a series of blogs running from 2007 through 2010.
My Takeaways:
In Segment 13, it was reported that Cuba ranked fourth among the 20 Latin America Republics in per capita income before Fidel Castro took control of the government on January 1, 1959. At that time its per capita income was 90% as high as Italy, far higher than Japan, and six times higher than India. Further, Cuba’s President, Fulgencio Batista, was successful in making the island a highly profitable tourist mecca. As a result, from 1950 to 1959, overall national income jumped 22% and 10-30% of Cuban workers were covered with health and medical insurance for the first time. Upon takeover, Fidel Castro instituted Communism/Socialism.
I can personally attest to Cuba’s prosperity before the takeover, as I lived on the eastern part of the island in Santiago de Cuba from April 1957 to March 1958 as a teenager. My father had been transferred there by his employer Texaco to participate in the startup of a new oil refinery to produce finished gasoline from Venezuelan crude oil. At the time, the U.S. heavily taxed imported crude oil but not on imported finished gasoline, hence why the refinery was located in Cuba. Living there, I only noted five things of significant difference than living in the U.S.
- The language was different.
- There were no high schools opened in Santiago, as all had been closed because most of the teenage boys were fighting with the Castro forces in the outskirts of the city – hence there were no boys available to attend high school.
- The city experienced frequent power outages hence refrigeration was disrupted. As a result, the meat markets were open air and displayed a flag when fresh meat was available, and milk and produce were marketed by horse drawn carts which frequented the streets of inhabited areas.
- There were some areas of the city that were poverty stricken (e.g. shacks with dirt floors)
- There were soldiers of the Batista regime frequently observed in the downtown areas with machine guns over their shoulders.
Other than those five aspects, life was not significantly different than in the U.S. – housing was quite modern, services were available, food was plentiful (particularly fruits and vegetables), censorship was alleged but we never experienced any. Motels and restaurants were relatively new and the infrastructure of the city appeared to be sound (except for the power outages). I played baseball with the Cuban workers at the refinery, rode the bus downtown to go to the movies (sometime a bit hard to hear as the movies were all in English with Spanish sub-titles so the audience talked a lot during the film), and we frequented a nearby ocean beach.
The revolution was primarily over the graft and corruption of the Batista regime. My father experienced a bit of that when as chief accountant of the refinery he had to appear before a group of Batista officials to receive Texaco’s tax bill. The head official in front of several other officials openly told him, your taxes are this amount but if you write me a personal check for this reduced amount, we will consider the tax bill paid. Of course, the company paid the full amount to the government.
Next:
Segment 15 through 18 will focus on China. Segment 15 will analyze China under Strict Communist rule with Mao Zedong as Chairman of the Communist Party of China (CPC). The time frame is between 1949 – 1976 and the excerpts will focus primarily on two major socialist/communist initiatives – The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution.
Happy Learning,
Harley
SOCIALISM – SEGMENT 14
LIFE IN A COMMUNIST COUNTRY, CUBA - EXCERPTS
All of the excerpts in this segment are from Havana Real by Yoani Sanchez (2011)
INTRODUCTION: The author of Havana Real, Yoani Sanchez, was born in 1975 in a tenement in central Havana. Yoani’s adolescence was marked by a time of terrible scarcity – when the word, alumbron, was coined for the unusual situation of electricity being on; when fried grapefruit rinds took the place of meat in the national diet; when, it was rumored, melted condoms sometimes stood in for the cheese in a concoction that was anything but “pizza.” In April 2007, she launched her own blog, Generation Y. To post her entries she had to dress as a tourist and pretend to speak only German so she could sneak into hotel Internet cafes. It wasn’t until December of 2007 that she was able, for the first time, to provide her readers with the chance to comment.
The reach and power of Yoani’s blog soon grew. In early 2008, she was awarded Spain’s most prestigious journalism prize, and Time magazine named her one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.” A few weeks later, the Cuban regime’s “cyber response brigade” was finally able to block access to her blog throughout Cuba, and suddenly Yoani herself could no longer see her site. From that point on, Yoani had to rely on the help of friends and strangers, e-mailing her entries for others to post. She wrote, “Three years after my first tentative filing there are more than five hundred posts – some of which I have tried to compress in this book.”
FOOD: Given a ration card at birth, and entering adolescence during Cuba’s “Special Period,” my desires run away with me, or to show the naked hunger that I see in the faces of my friends. I look at them heading to the market with their plastic shopping-bags, often returning with them as empty as when they left. Food was an obsession that still marks us. Who will count the mental imbalances caused by those deprivations, the suicides, the escapes in improvised rafts to flee the empty plates, the person and professional projects that remain unfinished, the children who were not born, the frustration, and the compulsion we still have to put anything we can into our mouths? To mark the country’s fifty-year anniversary of January 1, we were allowed to buy a half-pound of ground beef through the ration system. With the humor that often saves us from going crazy, this unexpected delicacy was dubbed “Chavez’s hamburger,” referring to the obvious economic shoring-up coming from Venezuela. For its fiftieth anniversary the grand socialist revolution should aspire to more ambitious things. Although it seems frivolous, for many Cubans getting that beef was the most significant event of recent time.
I go out headed toward the non-rationed bakery, where a loaf of bread costs a whole day’s wages. Many people, in their strange and improvised costumes, are headed in the same direction. Everyone is going for the same staple food that has kept us in suspense for several weeks now. A few feet from the shop, someone up ahead cries out, “It’s all gone!” It’s like she’s thrown a bucket of cold water on us all. I turn around to go home. Tomorrow will be another day without breakfast.
LIVING CONDITIONS: This is the story of a building – Yugoslav model – that was build in the 1980s by people who were building their own homes for the first time. All the builders had to work between four and seven years building their apartments and later had to make payments – which, after twenty years, gave them the opportunity to have title to the property.
For the last four years no one has taken on the job of “manager” or “cleaner” here because fourteen floors, with long hallways and many stairs, are too much work for too little money. The elevator survives thanks to some residents who faced the dilemma of learning something about mechanics or taking the stairs. The water pump also has its own team of resident “water-pumpers” who repair it each time it breaks down. This self-management keeps the building from total collapse but cannot stabilize its decline. The common areas suffer from the indifference of a form of ownership that does not make it clear who owns what. The residents are not allowed to open a needed coffee shop to raise funds to invest in the building itself. Also, they are forbidden access to a wholesaler to buy the hundreds of meters of pipe needed to fix the many leaks. The neighbors must wait and hope that the Institute of Housing will designate funds for the needed repairs. Trapped in this bureaucratic nightmare, the dreamers watch plaster fall, iron rust and paint fade.
I go together with a friend to her house in Cerro, a crumbling old tenement occupied by seven families. Leaving her house, I can’t help but notice that incongruent combination of ostentation and misery that adorns our streets. My nose picks up the stench of an open sewer running across the sidewalk. Each morning she carries her own water into the tiny collective bathroom.
Forced cohabitation due to lack of housing leaves many women and children subject to humiliation and beatings. We don’t hear their testimony because, institutionally, domestic violence is barely recognized on the “idyllic island.” With the statistics that would prove its frequency unreported, it is very difficult to influence public opinion or to bring it to bear to reject these attacks. Our house, like so many, would have several generations living together, with suppressed battles taking place every day.
For the past four months, in her town of Piniar del Rio, the sanitary napkins haven’t come. She and her daughters cut up a couple of sheets and managed to make some pads, which they washed after each use. If the ration market lacks feminine hygiene products, the already small number of towels and pillowcases remaining in Cuban households will shrink even further.
Under the sink is the plastic bucket with which the entire family bathes. It’s been over twenty years since the pipes collapsed, and to use the bathroom they have to carry water from a tank on the patio. In winter they prepare a lukewarm bath thanks to an electrical heater made from two condensed-milk cans. Deterioration of the water system and the high price of plumbing parts contributes to the calamitous state of the toilets. Just washing one’s body, which should be an intimate and pleasant activity, is, for most of my compatriots, a series of inconveniences. To this poor state of infrastructure, we must add that buying shampoo and soap requires a currency different from that in which we are paid.
I search, without success, for a bottle of detergent to wash glasses smeared with grease and fingerprints. Looking for the soapy liquid, I walked a good part of Havana today, as television announcers call on us to redouble our hygiene efforts before the advance of the H1N1 virus. The alert has not caused shops to lower the price of cleaning products, not even the cost of simple soap, the equivalent of a full day’s wages. We cannot hide the fragility of our society in the face of an epidemic that requires material resources in the hands of citizens. If soaping the body and having a bit of alcohol to sterilize the hands become luxuries, how can we stop the pandemic that is already upon us?
On the corner is a hydrant that is the only water supply for hundreds of families in the area. Even the water carriers come to it with their 55-gallon tanks on old rickety carts that clatter as they roll by. People wait for the thin stream to fill containers and then return home, with the children helping to push the wagon. Inhabitants of this Central Havana neighborhood live in dilapidated tenements in the old mansions with ornamented walls and mold on the ceilings The condition of the housing doesn’t matter, nor whether it’s the rainy season or a drought; the problem lies under the ground, in the water mains as old and worn out as their grandparents.
SERVICES: I try to imagine an incredible 24 hours in which I wouldn’t have to rely on the black market. They fill the absence of dairy products at the rationed market. Not to mention the wide range of underground workers I must go to when my washing machine breaks, the gas oven clogs, or the shower stops working. All of them, in the shadows, sustain me day-to-day and supplement the limited services offered by the state.
Two years ago, social workers knocked at my door. They came as part of the overblown “Energy Revolution” campaign to change my incandescent light bulbs for energy-savers. I liked the warm yellow light from the living-room lamps. I had to give it up. They gave me another bulb that projected a pale light and lasted three weeks. But for the last two months, even those are not available. There are no lights bulbs of any kind in Havana.
BIRTH CONTROL: For many years, abortion was the most common method of birth control for thousands of Cuban women. In the eighties, condoms were an illusion, and when they finally became available, men refused to use them. But for the last few months an internal directive has limited the number of terminations of pregnancy. The reason is that the birth rate is falling, and they want to try to increase it, even if it means forcing women to give birth.
USE OF TIME: To us time is worth nothing. We can spend an hour online to pay the electric bill or consume half a day to get a pair of shoes repaired. If, at the end of the day, we have completed at least one errand, that is reason enough to feel fortunate.
SCHOOLS: For those who are not quite up to date with the “new educational methods” of Cuban middle school, I should explain that a TV in every classroom plays the role of teacher about 60% of the time. If young people are bored, they can’t say, “teacher, please repeat, I didn’t understand,” and they must copy without pause whatever is dictated on the screen. This new pedagogic technique is an attempt to alleviate the crisis in teachers caused by low salaries and little social or institutional recognition. A very high percentage of those who choose teaching – I would venture to guess nearly all of them – do so because they have no other option. They are the students who, because of bad grades, can’t aspire to a computer specialty or to a high school for hard sciences. After less than three years of training, they will be standing at a chalkboard in front of students nearly their own age. Without these “instant teachers” there would be no instructors at all.
HOSPITALS: A bucket in one hand, a pillow under my arm, and an electric fan balanced on my hip, I enter the door of the oncology hospital. I come into the room and Monica is holding her mother’s hand. I take out the little sack of detergent and the aromatic with which I’ll clean the bathroom; its “aroma” floods everything. With the bucket we can bathe her mother, because the water faucet doesn’t work. For the heavy scrubbing I brought a pair of yellow gloves, frightened of the germs that spread in a hospital. The pillow has been a wonder and a set of clean sheets manages to cover the mattress, stained with successive effluvia. The most welcome item is the fan, which I connect to two peeled wires hanging from the wall. I also brought some gauze and cotton of the black market. The most difficult – which cost me days and an incredible series of swaps – is suture thread for the surgery they will do tomorrow. When bedtime comes, a cockroach crosses the wall near the bed.
STATE CONTROL: I have difficulty calling to mind a single day in these last fifty years when Cubans weren’t warned that our powerful neighbor was thinking of invading us.
Students and workers are not authorized to have a physical space to post a little paper asking for a book, a computer part, or room to rent on the bulletin board. To me, not allowing bulletin boards is one of the most visible signs that all kinds of spontaneous organizations and interactions among citizens are controlled. These boards stuffed with ads energize and give life to schools, offices and shops. But here, posting the smallest card to sell X or buy Y is an act of transgression, something you must only do at night, in the shadows when no one is looking.
They are there to watch and record us. Dozens, hundreds of cameras scattered throughout the city, as if it were not enough that there are vans filled with police on every block, and the security forces in checked shirts. When these “fisheyes” began to be installed everywhere they generated a sense of paralysis among Havanans. Without intending it, the police have given us the crudest testimony they could about our present reality.
APPEALS TO THE STATE: At the guard station they showed their identity cards, and inside, behind the bulletproof glass, a man takes their papers and gives back a receipt. An appeal to the “highest authorities” is the hope of all who wait there. Many have traveled hundreds of kilometers for this last chance. The lady in the red pants is here because here house fell down 12 years ago and she lives in a shelter; the old man with the shattered voice demands a pension, snatched from him by bureaucracy and inefficiency; a young woman claims that her boyfriend is in prison even though he’s innocent. The scene repeats itself every morning, Monday to Friday. Sometimes they raise their voices, mothers bring their kids to beg as a family, and someone appeals for calm saying, “Hey guys, shut up and wait, ‘cause’ if you don’t, you won’t get anything.
FEAR: About six in the evening, we headed out to celebrate my sister’s 36th birthday. On Boyeros Avenue, a few yards from the Ministry of the Interior and Raul Castro’s office, three cars stopped our miserable Russian Lada taxi. “Don’t even think about going to 23rd Street, Yoani, because the Union of Young Communists is having an event,” shouted the man who got out of the Chinese-made Geely, which reminded me of a sharp pain in my lumbar zone. I had already lived through something similar last November. Today I will not allow them to put me head-first into another car with my son, Reinaldo. A huge man got out of the vehicle and started to repeat his threats. “What is your name?” Reinaldo kept asking. The man never bothered to respond. A professional camera filmed our every move, waiting for an aggressive pose, a vulgar phrase, and excess of anger. This injection of terror was brief.
How can we emerge unscathed from all this? How can a citizen protect himself from a State that has the police, the courts, the Rapid Response Brigades, the mass media, the capacity to defame and lie, the power to socially lynch him and turn him into someone defeated and apologetic? I feel a terror that almost doesn’t let me type. But I want to tell those who threatened me and my family today, when one reaches a certain level of panic, higher doses don’t make any difference. I will not stop writing or Twittering; I have no plans to close my blog, nor abandon the practice of thinking independently, and – above all – I will not stop believing that they are much more frightened than I am.
THE STATE AND HOPE: Raul’s threat hangs over us: Cuba would rather die than change. His speech evokes a foxhole surrounded by sandbags, a rifle to shoot we don’t know whom, and a final bullet reserved for ourselves. Meanwhile the General stands firmly at his post, checking from a distance that all obey the final order of self-destruction.
Competitiveness was punished with accusations very difficult to expunge from our dossiers, accusations such as “self-sufficient” of “immodest.” Success must be – or be seen to be – shared, the fruit of everyone’s labors under the wise direction of the Party. And so, we learned that self-esteem must be hidden, and enterprising enthusiasm reined in. The mediocre made a killing in this society while conformity clipped the wings of the most daring.
Every time I ask my acquaintances about their plans for the future, and I hear, more than half the time, “What I want is to leave.” This answer grows alarmingly more frequent the younger the person is. How many will have to leave before we can hear the phrase, “We failed, we haven’t been able to give Cubans a future”?
NEWS AND CENSORSHIP: Censorship – State control over information, ideological selection in certain professions, indoctrination in education, and punishment of those who think differently. We would kick it to be able to serf the Internet without blocked websites, to be able to say the word “freedom” into an open microphone without being accused of “a counterrevolutionary provocation.”
Source: Havana Real by Yoani Sanchez
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
LIFE IN A COMMUNIST COUNTRY, CUBA - EXCERPTS
All of the excerpts in this segment are from Havana Real by Yoani Sanchez (2011)
INTRODUCTION: The author of Havana Real, Yoani Sanchez, was born in 1975 in a tenement in central Havana. Yoani’s adolescence was marked by a time of terrible scarcity – when the word, alumbron, was coined for the unusual situation of electricity being on; when fried grapefruit rinds took the place of meat in the national diet; when, it was rumored, melted condoms sometimes stood in for the cheese in a concoction that was anything but “pizza.” In April 2007, she launched her own blog, Generation Y. To post her entries she had to dress as a tourist and pretend to speak only German so she could sneak into hotel Internet cafes. It wasn’t until December of 2007 that she was able, for the first time, to provide her readers with the chance to comment.
The reach and power of Yoani’s blog soon grew. In early 2008, she was awarded Spain’s most prestigious journalism prize, and Time magazine named her one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.” A few weeks later, the Cuban regime’s “cyber response brigade” was finally able to block access to her blog throughout Cuba, and suddenly Yoani herself could no longer see her site. From that point on, Yoani had to rely on the help of friends and strangers, e-mailing her entries for others to post. She wrote, “Three years after my first tentative filing there are more than five hundred posts – some of which I have tried to compress in this book.”
FOOD: Given a ration card at birth, and entering adolescence during Cuba’s “Special Period,” my desires run away with me, or to show the naked hunger that I see in the faces of my friends. I look at them heading to the market with their plastic shopping-bags, often returning with them as empty as when they left. Food was an obsession that still marks us. Who will count the mental imbalances caused by those deprivations, the suicides, the escapes in improvised rafts to flee the empty plates, the person and professional projects that remain unfinished, the children who were not born, the frustration, and the compulsion we still have to put anything we can into our mouths? To mark the country’s fifty-year anniversary of January 1, we were allowed to buy a half-pound of ground beef through the ration system. With the humor that often saves us from going crazy, this unexpected delicacy was dubbed “Chavez’s hamburger,” referring to the obvious economic shoring-up coming from Venezuela. For its fiftieth anniversary the grand socialist revolution should aspire to more ambitious things. Although it seems frivolous, for many Cubans getting that beef was the most significant event of recent time.
I go out headed toward the non-rationed bakery, where a loaf of bread costs a whole day’s wages. Many people, in their strange and improvised costumes, are headed in the same direction. Everyone is going for the same staple food that has kept us in suspense for several weeks now. A few feet from the shop, someone up ahead cries out, “It’s all gone!” It’s like she’s thrown a bucket of cold water on us all. I turn around to go home. Tomorrow will be another day without breakfast.
LIVING CONDITIONS: This is the story of a building – Yugoslav model – that was build in the 1980s by people who were building their own homes for the first time. All the builders had to work between four and seven years building their apartments and later had to make payments – which, after twenty years, gave them the opportunity to have title to the property.
For the last four years no one has taken on the job of “manager” or “cleaner” here because fourteen floors, with long hallways and many stairs, are too much work for too little money. The elevator survives thanks to some residents who faced the dilemma of learning something about mechanics or taking the stairs. The water pump also has its own team of resident “water-pumpers” who repair it each time it breaks down. This self-management keeps the building from total collapse but cannot stabilize its decline. The common areas suffer from the indifference of a form of ownership that does not make it clear who owns what. The residents are not allowed to open a needed coffee shop to raise funds to invest in the building itself. Also, they are forbidden access to a wholesaler to buy the hundreds of meters of pipe needed to fix the many leaks. The neighbors must wait and hope that the Institute of Housing will designate funds for the needed repairs. Trapped in this bureaucratic nightmare, the dreamers watch plaster fall, iron rust and paint fade.
I go together with a friend to her house in Cerro, a crumbling old tenement occupied by seven families. Leaving her house, I can’t help but notice that incongruent combination of ostentation and misery that adorns our streets. My nose picks up the stench of an open sewer running across the sidewalk. Each morning she carries her own water into the tiny collective bathroom.
Forced cohabitation due to lack of housing leaves many women and children subject to humiliation and beatings. We don’t hear their testimony because, institutionally, domestic violence is barely recognized on the “idyllic island.” With the statistics that would prove its frequency unreported, it is very difficult to influence public opinion or to bring it to bear to reject these attacks. Our house, like so many, would have several generations living together, with suppressed battles taking place every day.
For the past four months, in her town of Piniar del Rio, the sanitary napkins haven’t come. She and her daughters cut up a couple of sheets and managed to make some pads, which they washed after each use. If the ration market lacks feminine hygiene products, the already small number of towels and pillowcases remaining in Cuban households will shrink even further.
Under the sink is the plastic bucket with which the entire family bathes. It’s been over twenty years since the pipes collapsed, and to use the bathroom they have to carry water from a tank on the patio. In winter they prepare a lukewarm bath thanks to an electrical heater made from two condensed-milk cans. Deterioration of the water system and the high price of plumbing parts contributes to the calamitous state of the toilets. Just washing one’s body, which should be an intimate and pleasant activity, is, for most of my compatriots, a series of inconveniences. To this poor state of infrastructure, we must add that buying shampoo and soap requires a currency different from that in which we are paid.
I search, without success, for a bottle of detergent to wash glasses smeared with grease and fingerprints. Looking for the soapy liquid, I walked a good part of Havana today, as television announcers call on us to redouble our hygiene efforts before the advance of the H1N1 virus. The alert has not caused shops to lower the price of cleaning products, not even the cost of simple soap, the equivalent of a full day’s wages. We cannot hide the fragility of our society in the face of an epidemic that requires material resources in the hands of citizens. If soaping the body and having a bit of alcohol to sterilize the hands become luxuries, how can we stop the pandemic that is already upon us?
On the corner is a hydrant that is the only water supply for hundreds of families in the area. Even the water carriers come to it with their 55-gallon tanks on old rickety carts that clatter as they roll by. People wait for the thin stream to fill containers and then return home, with the children helping to push the wagon. Inhabitants of this Central Havana neighborhood live in dilapidated tenements in the old mansions with ornamented walls and mold on the ceilings The condition of the housing doesn’t matter, nor whether it’s the rainy season or a drought; the problem lies under the ground, in the water mains as old and worn out as their grandparents.
SERVICES: I try to imagine an incredible 24 hours in which I wouldn’t have to rely on the black market. They fill the absence of dairy products at the rationed market. Not to mention the wide range of underground workers I must go to when my washing machine breaks, the gas oven clogs, or the shower stops working. All of them, in the shadows, sustain me day-to-day and supplement the limited services offered by the state.
Two years ago, social workers knocked at my door. They came as part of the overblown “Energy Revolution” campaign to change my incandescent light bulbs for energy-savers. I liked the warm yellow light from the living-room lamps. I had to give it up. They gave me another bulb that projected a pale light and lasted three weeks. But for the last two months, even those are not available. There are no lights bulbs of any kind in Havana.
BIRTH CONTROL: For many years, abortion was the most common method of birth control for thousands of Cuban women. In the eighties, condoms were an illusion, and when they finally became available, men refused to use them. But for the last few months an internal directive has limited the number of terminations of pregnancy. The reason is that the birth rate is falling, and they want to try to increase it, even if it means forcing women to give birth.
USE OF TIME: To us time is worth nothing. We can spend an hour online to pay the electric bill or consume half a day to get a pair of shoes repaired. If, at the end of the day, we have completed at least one errand, that is reason enough to feel fortunate.
SCHOOLS: For those who are not quite up to date with the “new educational methods” of Cuban middle school, I should explain that a TV in every classroom plays the role of teacher about 60% of the time. If young people are bored, they can’t say, “teacher, please repeat, I didn’t understand,” and they must copy without pause whatever is dictated on the screen. This new pedagogic technique is an attempt to alleviate the crisis in teachers caused by low salaries and little social or institutional recognition. A very high percentage of those who choose teaching – I would venture to guess nearly all of them – do so because they have no other option. They are the students who, because of bad grades, can’t aspire to a computer specialty or to a high school for hard sciences. After less than three years of training, they will be standing at a chalkboard in front of students nearly their own age. Without these “instant teachers” there would be no instructors at all.
HOSPITALS: A bucket in one hand, a pillow under my arm, and an electric fan balanced on my hip, I enter the door of the oncology hospital. I come into the room and Monica is holding her mother’s hand. I take out the little sack of detergent and the aromatic with which I’ll clean the bathroom; its “aroma” floods everything. With the bucket we can bathe her mother, because the water faucet doesn’t work. For the heavy scrubbing I brought a pair of yellow gloves, frightened of the germs that spread in a hospital. The pillow has been a wonder and a set of clean sheets manages to cover the mattress, stained with successive effluvia. The most welcome item is the fan, which I connect to two peeled wires hanging from the wall. I also brought some gauze and cotton of the black market. The most difficult – which cost me days and an incredible series of swaps – is suture thread for the surgery they will do tomorrow. When bedtime comes, a cockroach crosses the wall near the bed.
STATE CONTROL: I have difficulty calling to mind a single day in these last fifty years when Cubans weren’t warned that our powerful neighbor was thinking of invading us.
Students and workers are not authorized to have a physical space to post a little paper asking for a book, a computer part, or room to rent on the bulletin board. To me, not allowing bulletin boards is one of the most visible signs that all kinds of spontaneous organizations and interactions among citizens are controlled. These boards stuffed with ads energize and give life to schools, offices and shops. But here, posting the smallest card to sell X or buy Y is an act of transgression, something you must only do at night, in the shadows when no one is looking.
They are there to watch and record us. Dozens, hundreds of cameras scattered throughout the city, as if it were not enough that there are vans filled with police on every block, and the security forces in checked shirts. When these “fisheyes” began to be installed everywhere they generated a sense of paralysis among Havanans. Without intending it, the police have given us the crudest testimony they could about our present reality.
APPEALS TO THE STATE: At the guard station they showed their identity cards, and inside, behind the bulletproof glass, a man takes their papers and gives back a receipt. An appeal to the “highest authorities” is the hope of all who wait there. Many have traveled hundreds of kilometers for this last chance. The lady in the red pants is here because here house fell down 12 years ago and she lives in a shelter; the old man with the shattered voice demands a pension, snatched from him by bureaucracy and inefficiency; a young woman claims that her boyfriend is in prison even though he’s innocent. The scene repeats itself every morning, Monday to Friday. Sometimes they raise their voices, mothers bring their kids to beg as a family, and someone appeals for calm saying, “Hey guys, shut up and wait, ‘cause’ if you don’t, you won’t get anything.
FEAR: About six in the evening, we headed out to celebrate my sister’s 36th birthday. On Boyeros Avenue, a few yards from the Ministry of the Interior and Raul Castro’s office, three cars stopped our miserable Russian Lada taxi. “Don’t even think about going to 23rd Street, Yoani, because the Union of Young Communists is having an event,” shouted the man who got out of the Chinese-made Geely, which reminded me of a sharp pain in my lumbar zone. I had already lived through something similar last November. Today I will not allow them to put me head-first into another car with my son, Reinaldo. A huge man got out of the vehicle and started to repeat his threats. “What is your name?” Reinaldo kept asking. The man never bothered to respond. A professional camera filmed our every move, waiting for an aggressive pose, a vulgar phrase, and excess of anger. This injection of terror was brief.
How can we emerge unscathed from all this? How can a citizen protect himself from a State that has the police, the courts, the Rapid Response Brigades, the mass media, the capacity to defame and lie, the power to socially lynch him and turn him into someone defeated and apologetic? I feel a terror that almost doesn’t let me type. But I want to tell those who threatened me and my family today, when one reaches a certain level of panic, higher doses don’t make any difference. I will not stop writing or Twittering; I have no plans to close my blog, nor abandon the practice of thinking independently, and – above all – I will not stop believing that they are much more frightened than I am.
THE STATE AND HOPE: Raul’s threat hangs over us: Cuba would rather die than change. His speech evokes a foxhole surrounded by sandbags, a rifle to shoot we don’t know whom, and a final bullet reserved for ourselves. Meanwhile the General stands firmly at his post, checking from a distance that all obey the final order of self-destruction.
Competitiveness was punished with accusations very difficult to expunge from our dossiers, accusations such as “self-sufficient” of “immodest.” Success must be – or be seen to be – shared, the fruit of everyone’s labors under the wise direction of the Party. And so, we learned that self-esteem must be hidden, and enterprising enthusiasm reined in. The mediocre made a killing in this society while conformity clipped the wings of the most daring.
Every time I ask my acquaintances about their plans for the future, and I hear, more than half the time, “What I want is to leave.” This answer grows alarmingly more frequent the younger the person is. How many will have to leave before we can hear the phrase, “We failed, we haven’t been able to give Cubans a future”?
NEWS AND CENSORSHIP: Censorship – State control over information, ideological selection in certain professions, indoctrination in education, and punishment of those who think differently. We would kick it to be able to serf the Internet without blocked websites, to be able to say the word “freedom” into an open microphone without being accused of “a counterrevolutionary provocation.”
Source: Havana Real by Yoani Sanchez
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 14_soc_life_in_cuba.pdf |