HAVANA.- It is said with great insistence that some memes They could be tremendously funny and make you laugh out loud; It is even assured that they could even dilute a lot of sadness, and cause raucous laughter. Some memes are very funny, but there are also those that turn out to be very sad, and more than sad, those that distress, that are rude, even insulting.
And I looked at a meme just a few days ago, a meme that managed to make me laugh out loud, and those laughs were so resonant, so disproportionate, that I came to suspect that that so much laughter could achieve the dissolution of the many sadnesses that today, relentless, harass us and could even leave us dying of laughter forever, and also cry, cry a lot.
I looked at that meme that could make us laugh but, more than anything, it should make us cry. It turns out that this publication puts us in front of our most significant limitations, those that distress us, and now, without any apparent remedy, they could even kill us.
And at the very center of that meme is a man who spends most of his life saving lives. In the very center there is a doctor who spent years and years studying, and to whom his salary is not enough, the one who earns by saving the lives of his contemporaries, And that man in the meme survives by selling those little sachets in which the Zuco soft drink is kept, the one that refreshes the Cubans’ thirst a little, and perhaps even their hunger.
In Cuba there are many doctors whose salaries, sadly, are not enough. A man, a woman, studied for six long years to save lives, and then the money they receive is not enough for more than a few days, and they have to do the greatest adventures, the most extravagant juggling to stretch the money, so that it lasts a little longer.
And that’s why these memes are circulated, that’s why doctors become a joke, and we laugh shamelessly. A man, a woman, who studied for years, who “burned their eyelashes”, then become overwhelmed because they do not know what they are going to put on their plate to calm the hunger of their children, the hunger of themselves, even if they spent years in “distant rivers”, to fill the pockets of a cruel and merciless government.
Years away from yours and then they do not have enough salary that was decided for them by an erratic and shameless government that pockets large amounts that were earned by those doctors in the fulfillment of long internationalist missions, as they are called. And for a man, a woman, who studied a lot, and for years, the money from their salaries is not enough. Some doctors who studied for years, who carried out internationalist missions, do not have enough money beyond a week’s survival, even though they protect the health of their compatriots.
That meme puts us in front of the greatest miseries that we suffer, those that distress us. And at the center of that meme is a doctor who, in addition to saving and saving lives and lives, spending hours and hours of sleeplessness in a hospital room, sells sachets of zuco soda and also lollipops.
The life of a doctor, of a country, reduced to a meme. Our worst anxieties warned with a few very brief words. A doctor who sells what he finds because his salary is insufficient to guarantee his life, the life of his people, although I think it would be better to call it survival, even death, even exploitation.
Studying medicine in Cuba could turn you into a meme, a mockery that warns us of a very great reality, a sad reality that is shameless exploitation, the kind to which Cuban doctors are subjected, that doctor in an office can earn seven thousand or eight thousand pesos a month, while a specialist could earn seven thousand or eight thousand pesos, and that leads them to seek survival by selling Zuco brand soft drinks, and worse things, those that turn them into a meme, into a huge mockery, in a blatant outrage.
