HAVANA, Cuba. – “They seem to be permanently angry. Some of them, I could even say, look at us with a mixture of hatred and contempt, like ‘it bothers me to serve you,’” a friend tells me, oblivious to any paranoia but very affected by what he has ironically dubbed the true “country brand” and which in reality is the constant mistreatment that Cubans give and receive from each other, to the point that some have come to normalize the problem.
“It has escalated so much that if you get angry or complain in public, you are the weird one,” commented another friend, and gave two recent experiences he had as examples. The first with an employee of the La Época store, in Havanaand the second with a driver of the shared taxi in which she was traveling.
“I complained about the poor service,” he says. “Not only were they being rude to me, but to the other customers as well. They shouted at us and mistreated us as if we were beggars harassing them, but even so, no one showed solidarity with me. On the contrary, they looked at me as if I was crazy and a troublemaker. They defended both the driver and the shopkeeper, even though both continued to mistreat and be rude to the very people who were defending them. This is something that worries me a lot because it happens all the time, everywhere, and very few people seem surprised.”
It is about what I call “national rudeness” and that in a certain way has also traveled and migrated with us to where we have gone thinking that we left everything behind, but it is not so. It is as if being rude, despotic and violent were part of a “culture” that we only call as such perhaps to justify ourselves for the total lack of it, due to the deformations and degradations that an educational system has suffered for decades whose main objective is not to educate or inculcate values, but to inoculate blind obedience not so much to an ideology or party —those are only pretexts—, but to a totalitarian regime without true ideology or ethical and moral principles, whose relations with citizens are rude and violent.
This could be the root of the evil that these friends denounce, our attitudes being only a reflection of an abusive political system that, in order to achieve our obedience, begins by removing our empathy, replacing it with “programmed” attitudes and reflex actions that respond, like a herd, to a brotherhood, a regulation, a “base committee,” a “political and mass” organization, an order, a decree, a position, an irrevocable power, an institutionalized bureaucracy, an ideology, even a “task,” a “mission.” And these “marks,” as we can see daily, are revealed in the jargon we use within this “culture” of rudeness.
For example, the impersonal, dehumanized, mechanical, police-style, dictatorial treatment we receive at the entrance of a bank, at a checkout counter, at a grocery store or pharmacy, at a doctor’s office, and even in the “population care” systems — designed to evade us and not to care for us — repeat the despotic scheme of a regime that is aware that its permanence in power does not depend on our will but on its ability to effectively violate us, on its ability to transform us into beasts, that is, into animals with the ability to fight each other to the death but, at the same time, to meekly obey the owner of the flock, even if the orders are not to their liking.
However, what could serve to understand the deeper mechanisms of the “system” does not efficiently explain the underlying, almost generalized anger that we detected in these rude actions and reactions both in the bank employee and in the OFFICEsuch as the waitress in a private restaurant or a state-run cafeteria, the nurse, the doorman, the customs agent, and even the forklift driver or the internet salesman who, in order to sell his merchandise quickly, should first get rid of “annoyances.”
But in the anger that overwhelms almost all of us, in the deep rage that we carry with us, even years after having escaped from that little machine that grinds meat and souls that we call Cuba, disappointments, frustrations and even false resignations are hidden in highly toxic quantities.
Thus, only those who know how to deal with the lethal burden that each of us carries to a greater or lesser extent, those who are aware that we carry it even against our will, can be astonished and even worried by the rudeness that unfortunately invades and destroys us. The rest, angry but obedient, are simply not capable of seeing it even in themselves. That rudeness is the true “country brand”, like any brand made with a hot iron.
