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FROM
CUBA
Cubans on the brink of a panic attack
Rafael Ferro Salas, Abdala Press
PINAR DEL RÍO, Cuba - July (www.cubanet.org)
- Six o'clock in the morning, Cuba. Felipe,
77 years old, leaves his house. He arrives
at the corner cafeteria and waits for his
first customer to arrive. A 20-year old
mulato man approaches him. Felipe puts his
hand in his pocket and takes out two cigarettes.
The mulato pays him.
By the end of a half hour a dozen persons
have bought cigarettes sold by the elderly
Felipe. Everything seems normal, but it's
not; the old man sells the cigarettes secretly.
This kind of selling is forbidden in Cuba.
At mid-morning, the old man goes home after
buying the newspaper. "Today was good,"
he says to me. "There were no police,
nor inspectors with their fines, but I never
stop being nervous."
At the other end of the city lives Miriam,
32 years old. She's a black woman who has
a two-year old boy. She's single. She works
at the place where kerosene is sold for
household stoves (abundant in Cuba). Miriam's
salary doesn't provide her enough to live
on and maintain her son, so she seeks alternatives
amid high risks.
Near the end of her work shift a sixty-year
old woman visits her. She hands over a big
can and Miriam fills it with kerosene. The
woman pays and leaves satisfied. She was
sold her share of kerosene a week ago using
her ration card. But it didn't last. So
she comes to Miriam and she sells her the
extra under the table.
"If we aren't lucky and an inspector
catches us, they'll fire me and impose a
fine on her," Miriam tells me. "I
do everything for my son, the money they
pay me doesn't even allow me to clothe him.
I get very nervous when I do this. I live
alone with my son, and if they fire me from
my job or jail me, I don't know what I'd
do."
Orlando Zamora is a young man who graduated
in computer science two years ago. He is
self-employed and works at home writing
graduate theses for which he is well paid.
Since his graduation he hasn't found work,
so writing theses allows him to survive.
I found him one afternoon in the park and
he told me he hadn't done any work the whole
day. I asked him if his clientele had slackened
and he answered me: "There's never
a lack of clients, there's always someone
who's going to graduate. What happens is
I'm afraid to start writing and have a power
outage break my computer. Then I'll have
to throw it in and die of hunger."
"The power outages make you nervous,
don't they?" I asked him in jest. He
responded very seriously.
"They have everyone nervous, pal.
I think we Cubans will have blackouts for
the rest of our lives. It seems the one
we'll have after we die isn't enough."
Thinking of what he just told me makes
me nervous, too. I realize I've also been
attacked today by the syndrome Cubans are
dragging behind for some time: the panic
attack.
Walking the city is like walking in the
1960s, although I was too young then to
do it alone. My mother was at my side. I
remember she walked nervously. It seemed
we all walked nervously. It was the month
of October and we were on the brink of an
explosion. Later it became known as the
October Missile Crisis.
We Cubans have never stopped being nervous
after January 1959. The 1960s arrived and
we enlisted in obligatory foreign wars.
The 1980s came with collapses and firing
squads in high circles. The 1990s left us
without any kind of hopes. The new millenium
opened its doors but things continue to
cling to an enforced stagnation. Cubans
debate amidst uncertainty with something
in common: we all live on the brink of a
panic attack.
Versión
original en español
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