Havana Cuba. – If the fuel solution is create WhatsApp groups and mobile applications that replace the huge queues, then it is “official signal” that this another new chapter of scarcity bites and spreads. And it is that they have done so every time a queue turns into a violent riot, and potentially a social outbreak.
Thus, it is not so much that the agglomerations —like those of chicken and oil in TRD or those of dollars in CADECA; like the lines for bread or the passport stamps- embarrass the “continuists” but, when they know that things will get worse, that the brand new shortage will become endemic and that this will increase popular discontent (especially within of their own ranks), they hurry to “disintegrate” those “hot spots” where it is enough for someone desperate to explode for anger to cause a chain reaction.
And it is that the anger, the rage, the madness of a people condemned to queue for absolutely everything do not go away with that ridiculous narrative of the official media with which they have tried to sell us the queue —symbol of the communist debacle— as the place where shy boys make friends and dominoes play dominoes.
People are not only suspicious of the “good performance” of these “happy coleros”, as “spontaneous” and “creative” as the zombie mob that they gather in acts of repudiation against opponents and dissidents, but of something worse: that the shortage of supplies of fuel is here to stay, and even that this could be the best pretext and prelude for CUPET, tired of charging 24 pesos a liter of gasoline (about 15 cents at the current exchange rate), to launch into the jugular of ordinary Cubans with an “updated rate” that takes current demand and speculation prices as a reference, just as at the time the Central Bank used street exchange rates to design its own.
The signs of a possible elimination of the fuel subsidy are there as they were the day before the announcement of the purchase and sale of dollars in CADECA, even though they swore and perjured that they would never take the abusive prices of the street market as a reference, but finally they did .
The hours before the jug of cold water in the foreign exchange market, social networks were filled with publications where some users launched the “augury” as one who lets the ball run to probe reactions. Something similar is happening these days, when the price of a liter of gasoline is achieved, even at the foot of the pump and in line with the track, between 600 and 700 Cuban pesos.
It is striking that, among the complaints about the rise in prices, those that ask for government intervention not so much to punish illegalities but so that, once the situation improves, establish a balance between the prices of the contraband and those of CUPET above 200 pesos per liter, to “avoid hoarding” and, above all, so that the purchase of fuel in the international market “is not an onerous burden for the State.” That is to say, the hanged man placing the noose around his neck to avoid a hard time for the executioner.
I have never managed to meet in person, face to face, one of those guys who think of similar suicidal ideas, it seems that they only inhabit that impersonal universe (at times ghostly when it comes to cyberclairs), of social networks and that therefore they barely fulfill the mission of creating a state of opinion and, incidentally, offering the evidence so that a future unpopular measure is justified in a false general claim, as has been the way of operating the regime for decades, even when the social networks but yes, that bunch of blank commitments that the “mass organizations” made us sign in exchange for a weekend at a campsite or the right to buy a bun with a hamburger or a Russian blender.
Hopefully, in the end, everything will remain in rumors, but the experience of so many years warns us that it is huge boulders (and more ambitious, desperate fishermen) that this time make our troubled river sound, so that gasoline and oil, among the last strongholds of “Cuban-style socialism” safe from inflation, sooner rather than later they could end up surrendering to high prices. Even more so when the harsh reality falls on high-ranking soldiers and tough guys from the PCC, who keep their “assignments” and “reserves” guaranteed, in their special service centers; and much more so when there is an abundance of stupid Cubans —generally remittances or “repatriated”, part-time or full-time— who, to pretend that misery does not affect them, are willing to pay whatever they ask.
OPINION ARTICLE
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