HAVANA, Cuba.- The problem of the mountains of garbage The waste that is burying our neighborhoods is the people who do not cooperate with hygiene and not the government that, when it finds a penny while sweeping the pockets of citizens, does not invest it in an effective and lasting sanitation system but in more empty hotels.
That’s how easy it is to resolve the critical hygiene situation these days with some little Cuban television programs that seem to be written and directed by the same guys (because they have to be called that) who also tell you that the very high prices, the dollar that doesn’t go down, the resistance to banking and payment by telephone transfer are problems created by the SMEs “bad”, the TCP, the black market and other “illegalities”, but not by those who pretending to “order” ended up “deflating” what the “continuity” already received “deflated” with full awareness of what it received, so there is no naivety in the current “juncture”.
Even in something as sensitive as dengue epidemics and orapouche (and who knows what other diseases are overwhelming Cubans these days) the attitude of the Ministry of Public Health is to wash its hands and shift its blame for this epidemiological debacle to us under the pretext of “individual responsibility,” so that if there are mosquitoes, flies, cockroaches and mice invading our homes it is because we do not carry out “self-focus,” because we do not mow our yards, and not because the state departments in charge of vector control have not been working for years or because the few resources that are imported are destined exclusively for the tourist sector and the “special attention” received by those neighborhoods where the regime’s leaders live.
Thus, we accumulate water in vessels and tanks inside and outside our homes not out of “need,” not because the supply is usually irregular or non-existent, but out of evil; and we fill our yards with “junk” out of madness or neglect and not out of fear of throwing away something apparently useless that we might need tomorrow in a country where absolutely everything is expensive or very difficult to find.
In this vein of the regime’s discourse, for example, people do not work because they are lazy, and not because the salaries are extremely abusive as well as the working conditions are terrible; they eat banana peels because they are “creative” and not because they are not for hungry; or young people emigrate obsessed with material things, deceived by “enemy propaganda” and not because they do not want to repeat in their lives the failure of their parents and grandparents, whose lives are condemned to the line of the minced meat, to voluntary work and to the shock of a last-minute “news note” read as a collective threat in the Round Table and the eight o’clock news.
The “shifting the blame” formula worked for them even at some point when the public transport It was not as critical as it is now. Perhaps because of complicity in the matter, perhaps because they could not find a way to resolve it (and thus not make their ineptitude or lack of concern evident), for years they bombarded us with the idea that “social indiscipline” was the cause of the decrease in the number of cars in service when the reality was much more complex, from corruption and theft within transport companies to budget cuts in the sector to use it in other “priority sectors”, and we already know the “ideological” burden that this carries under a communist system.
Today, when they cannot resort to the “it’s your fault” argument, since state transport has been reduced to almost zero and the routes now belong almost entirely to private companies, they resort to the last resort of “blockade”, which places the responsibility in someone else’s hands.
But this “bad neighbor” thing doesn’t explain what we all know on the street, because the drivers themselves tell us, and that is that the parts they use in cars, trucks and buses are bought from the same state transport companies that now, almost free of the responsibility of transporting that was their “corporate purpose”, have as their main source of income serving as suppliers of parts and components to the private sector, to which they even rent their vehicles under a contract that ties them to them in the style of a true mafia monopoly, not a transport company.
We could spend hours carefully breaking down the evil puppet of “socialism, Cuban style” to verify all the times that the transfer of blame is in reality the almost sole objective of every speech of the regime, of every law and decree approved from 1959 to the present, of every meeting or congress where they promise to find solutions, but none that puts them at risk even remotely. So the “Revolution” is not about how to “build socialism” but about how to keep its mediocre builders alive, despite the fact that they build nothing, and that can only be achieved by throwing their constant botched jobs into the garbage bag.
The worst part is that there are thousands of Cubans willing to accept this burden of injustice, not because they believe in the innocence of the person who is burdened with it, but because over the years they have become accustomed to carrying this weight and feel it as part of their body.
