There are millions of Cubans whose lives depend on that handful of rice “from the notebook” and they are not going to let it be taken away from them so easily.
HAVANA.- Anyone would wait for them to stop spouting nonsense at some point, but the thing is that, as for the Cuban regime, it is not a question of a mental limitation – which they undoubtedly suffer from – but rather a matter of perversity.
Those who thought that the “Havana cordon”, the “energy revolution”, the banana microjetthe obsession with moringa, the intensive breeding of ostriches, lemon as the base of everything, the “spoiled” heart, the rearrangement of the order and the disguised beggars They had exhausted their repertoire, because there they have proof that human stupidity is as infinite as the limits of the universe. The perversity of the Cuban communists – so similar to imbecility, so much so that at times we confuse them – may not have an end, not even once the dictatorship is overthrown.
It could fall tomorrow, but for a long time, perhaps for decades, and due to a matter of collective trauma or deformation of reasoning due to too many years under an enthronement of mediocrity, we will continue listening Things worse than those said by that Doctor of Science that led to “square a box” that there is no way to square it since it has been broken for too long.
Because the same people who today pretend that it is possible to square it have looted it (in order to continue the theft in full view of everyone), and they have done so precisely through “stupidities” and perversities, which are all those prohibitions, whims, improvisations, impositions, repressions and corruption disguised as “plans”, “tasks”, “experiments”, “openings” and “rectifications of errors” accumulated for more than 60 years. They have made the task of forming a top 100 too difficult, as some have proposed on social networks, thus reminding us how much abuse we and the generations that have preceded us have endured, and how astonishing our capacity to forget and endure is.
Even though almost all of us can clearly see that behind these “stupidities” true bad intentions are usually camouflaged. Just as in the small “dissidences” of the system, in the form of some “exceptional” intervention of a deputy in the National Assembly or the “daring” opinion of some ex-officio spokesperson, for example, they probe the states of opinion of a political force in power that today they know is more fragmented than in any other time of crisis.
Nothing and no one appears by chance on the official television of the Island, especially when the institution that controls it stopped calling itself the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television to become the terrifying Institute of Information and Social Communication, with everything that the words “information” and “communication” connote in a closed, monitored and punished society like the Cuban one.
It is the same manipulative monstrosity as before, although now much more perverse, to the point that we can affirm without a doubt that in Cuba television does not exist as a means of entertainment – although the stupidities we hear there regularly make us laugh – but rather as an instrument of control, repression and polling of the masses, now shamelessly assumed in the clear with content one hundred percent manufactured by the political police (With Edge, We make Cubafor example) but, also, with characters directly linked to the Castro clan, now converted into figures on the screen (the case of Marxlenin Pérez Valdés) or now into advisors and designers of communication strategies (such as the linguist Lydia Amalia Castro Odio, granddaughter of Fidel Castro).
These elements must be taken into account to understand that definitively eliminating rice and potatoes from the diet of ordinary Cubans was not just any example released among many other possible ones.
Dr. Roberto Caballero had the sad role of probing popular reactions to the idea that they have been considering for some time now of completely eliminating what they call “subsidized foods” and, in the process, extinguishing the supply booklet (actually, a ration card) and what remains of the “basic basket” in it. A concept that is a euphemism, as this is reduced to a handful of rice and another of sugar, plus some other casual, exceptional, “additional” element, depending on how the “social temperature” is in the streets.
Having left the obligation to build homes, generate electricity and guarantee education and health completely in the hands of the people, in a true “every man for himself”, the regime is now trying to get rid of another big problem (this time that of basic food, and the millions of dollars a month that the so-called “booklet” demands in expenses from the state budget) and cannot find how to do it.
It turned out well to gradually eliminate regular coffee deliveries, completely eliminate salt, reduce sugar quotas, extend blackouts and drinking water pumping cycles, raise Internet connection prices, dollarize the economy and even control population growth by facilitating mass emigration and folding its arms in the face of lethal virus epidemics. But with rice, for a people in agony who have nothing left to lose, taking it away is like delivering the coup de grace.
There are millions of Cubans whose lives depend on that handful of rice “from the notebook” and they are not going to let it be taken away from them so easily. When they took away the “mixed” coffee with peas, nothing happened. They got used to the fact that swallowing dry was what they had for breakfast and lunch until they arrived almost dead at the meal, where rice – which has been the indisputable base of the most authentic Cuban gastronomy – is becoming another luxury food.
They endured the disappearance of fish, beef, chicken, oil; They even managed to forget what French fries and mash taste like; They endured the perpetual installation of hunger in their lives, but possibly they will not do the same when rice is permanently taken away from them. Because, for Cubans, a meal without rice is synonymous with absolute misery, and even more so if there is not even a small light on the empty plate. The regime wants to get rid of this “dead man” and needs to measure reactions. He knows very well that, in Cuba, rice—and not lemon—is the base of everything.
