Havana Cuba. – It will be another “Day of Love” that we will let go because the atmosphere is not for celebrations. There is no money, there is no transportation; there are blackouts and muggings lurking everywhere, overpriced restaurants and very bad food.
This is how Cuban men and women respond on the street when asked what they will do this Valentine’s Day. A question that can only be asked as a joke because no one, knowing what is happening in Cuba today, would expect other answers that would not first come after a laugh or a string of complaints and regrets.
And if there is no money for celebrations, there will be much less for gifts. Not in these days when savings have no other better destination than to emigrate, as well as expectations about the best gift for more than one, as they respond without thinking too much, it is “find a sponsor”.
There are many who, having a partner but empty pockets, will resign themselves to staying at home, but also those who will go out to meet, without being too carried away by chance, with that lonely tourist who, “well worked” with pampering and affection On such a special day, you could end up paying for that dream wedding in Yuma or at least the well-timed remittance.
They will sell or rent the body to whoever takes it from here, they answer you without blushing, because anything done in order to escape is well justified, especially when some do worse things, truly despicable, for a chicken cage, an “oil tanker” cell phone or even a “exemplary citizen” diploma.
But, beyond the questions on the streets, the great “surprise” of what should be a “special day” for a regime that claims to “love love” is that there are no signs anywhere that they are willing to celebrate it, or rather, to offer the minimum opportunities so that, at least exceptionally, even with their very low salaries and their many burdens, people can have the illusion of a “day of love”.
Not even the stores that still function as such —and not as “boxes” to buy with a ticket “whatever the book touches”— have been decorated to date, and the exceptions to that rule of abandonment and total neglect, of “Institutionalized boredom” are just a couple of shops in MLC where, for example, the botch of a hastily written congratulations sign says everything about how much they care about selling and that the customer leaves pleased.
And it is that, in Cuba, a “commercial maneuver” of this type does not make sense because here the meaning of everything has been lost, even the meaning of a day like February 14.
Neither decorations nor public messages in the streets. Neither “special offers” at reasonable prices even when there are plenty of capacities in the hotels devastated by the lack of tourists. And it is that there can be no “love” for a national currency that in its “toxicity” causes so many “heartbreaks.”
As a consequence, instead of discounts for the occasion, prices in dollars (or equivalent to Cuban pesos at the “green” exchange rate on the street) are higher and more abusive every day, even for books of the fair whose editions and printing, at least partially, should have been deducted from the taxes paid by the “self-employed” and from the low wages received by the state worker.
Or is it that this indispensable part of culture —the right to read and learn, the love of reading— stopped being subsidized when that gentleman declared the “end of gratuities”? Why, if almost no one gets “benefits” or feels “love” for the “system” from which they want to escape, is it better not to officially declare the end of the dictatorship? Something yes, thought of as the great gift that everyone expects, would be a true act of love.
OPINION ARTICLE
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