The scene this morning in the Havana market at 17th and K, in Vedado, could be attributed to the passage of a cyclone. The empty and skeleton platforms, waiting for products that never arrived; the plastic boxes on the floor and upside down; the red earth, the rubbish that nobody sweeps and the absent vendors.
In one of the sales booths hung a solitary portrait of Fidel Castro, frowning, in olive green and stained with mud residue. When the market is full, Castro’s profile often works as a charm to scare away inspectors, to recognize the merchants who installed him in his place.
The trick is old and perhaps Soviet: the Czech writer and politician Václav Havel talks about a Slavic greengrocer who wrote slogans in his shop so that neither his colleagues nor the “people” of the Party would look at him badly, and thus sell his stuff calmly.
A Cuban farmer, who has to market his products according to the rules of the Cuban State, repeats this ritual of camouflage against power. Although Castro is insufferable to him, he has learned to use him as the patron saint of thieves and bandits.
However, today it is not much use: since it is a holiday, not even the inspectors are prowling the alleys of the market. Only the patient buyer, willing not to be defeated by the decreed shortages that the heroic date brings with it, manages to glimpse an avocado stand in the distance.
For 15 pesos you can buy a pound of green avocados. The same amount costs ginger, that Asian root to which Cubans are so little accustomed, and which could serve as a sedative infusion given the prices that are yet to be discovered, if they continue in search of food.
“Solavaya!” commented a customer in a picnic area near the market. “Avocados and ginger: that’s a deadly combination.” “And bad for your pocket,” an employee replied with a joke.
The buyer of 17 and K who, defeated, decides to go to the picnic area to warm his stomach, has to pay 70 pesos for a simple pizza. If he doesn’t want to choke on the dough, he should also order an instant soda, which won’t take long to hold his overheated kidneys accountable.
Once satisfied, so to speak, the buyer rethinks his strategy to get food this July 27.
As he ponders the causes and effects of national hunger, he sees the grimy truck passing by that distributes egg cartons from rationing in his neighborhood. As a soul that carries the devil, she runs to his cellar, only to verify that the steel mass on wheels is stopped in front of the store’s gate.
Thanks, once again, to the glorious anniversary, the employees have the day off and the trucker, who arrives an hour late, will not be able to unload the eggs. He panics and they look for someone who has the key, while the driver threatens the crowd: “Get up, I’m leaving!
The key appears, but a voice confirms to the buyer what he already knows: “Don’t get excited,” they tell him, “that no one will sell a single egg until tomorrow.”
He has to throw two mental insults at the portrait hanging on the remote dais at 17th and K. An older woman, head down, walks past him chewing the words, for lack of anything else to chew.
“Look for that,” he says, “the corpse of July 26 is still hot, and today we don’t even have a pumpkin for a sad broth. What did you celebrate so much yesterday?”
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