In Cuba is the crazy one who breastfeeds

Havana.- As happened during the call Special periodand as has happened in each decade since the castros took power, as this new crisis is exacerbated, there is also an increase in the number of people alienated wandering through the streets of towns and cities. Montones of teenagers, young adults, middle -aged or elderly people of both sexes wake aimless or thrown on the ground, showing mental problems or the effect of alcohol and drugs.

That increase is not accidental. In us, several triggers of this stress have joined. Valga list some.

First, there are the everlasting and untimely blackouts and what they imply. Beyond the anxiety about when the current will come or when they will take it again, beyond heat and discomfort: if the electricity cut occurs after having achieved food, the anguish of seeing how we are spoiled is also lost. If we also have no gas and we do not have to buy, we cannot cook or heat the food. For liquefied gas consumers, the purchase cycle has been dilated for several months, and that is when there is availability of fuel.

With regard to cooking, it is no less distressing to have to do it with firewood or coal in the absence of gas or electricity, often in small spaces, with the consequent irritation of eyes and lungs due to smoke, and not a few fatal accidents.

The heat is not negligible either. With moisture, sweat increases, which causes skin diseases such as fungi, rash and others. The impossibility of ventilating also brings the merciless attack of hejenes and mosquitoes, which, in addition to being annoying, anguish for fear of dengue, Zika, Chikungunya, Oroopouche and other diseases. That anguish is enhanced by the perspective of not being able to achieve necessary medicines in case of illness, since these do not exist in state pharmacies and their prices in the informal market are not available to everyone, or not being able to reach the hospital due to lack of transport.

But even more pressing is the imperative need to get daily foods, almost impossible task in a country where citizens are obliged to play cat and mouse with agents of order and other representatives of repressive organs.

As is natural, before getting food you have to get money, another nerve theme par excellence in Cubita la Bella. From the lack of money does not escape or who has a bank account. Not a few times, pensioners, retired and savers in general they have to return to their homes empty, because, however unlikely it seems, in the banks there is no cash.

The lack of funds not only affects daily food, but also other equally pressing issues, such as basic housing repairs. Year after year, cracks gain ground, as are the leaks in the rainy season. With cracks and leaks, the unease also grows, which feeds up with the certainty that if this year we could not fix the house, we can not the next one, because the cement and other materials will be more expensive. As a result, thousands of Cubans live under constant anguish that a bad day the roof falls on them.

For little money you have and no matter how bad the house is, no one is safe from robberies, raids or street assaults. The real possibility of being a victim of crime makes going out into the street, and even more so if we consider that to suffer a loss no one will come to our aid, because the Cuban uniformed are not to protect the decent citizen, but to safeguard the regime.

While the food spoils us, the house falls on us, the garbage dumps threaten to devour our streets and mosquitoes consume us alive, increase our anguish for the increasingly evident lies that make us swallow the official means. Journalists and spokesmen of the regime describe an idyllic panorama diametrically opposite to everyday reality, and that cruel mockery and those impudent lies are lactrating our self -love, our psyche and our sanity.

It also makes a dent in our mood the impossibility of developing a life project, except to emigrate. For young people, it is evident that there is no future on land that saw them born. For the elderly, it is devastating to recognize that they have wasted their existence between the stick and the carrot. For parents, it is distressing to think that their children will have a life as atrocious as they have had.

To top it up for stress, we cannot vent ourselves either. Each citizen is clear that, however overwhelming his reality, if he protests in public he can be even worse. In the largest of the Antilles, the right to protest and freedom of expression are penalized without exception with beatings and several years in jail. Repression works perfectly.

“I can eat rice only with sauce, but my special cigarrite cannot be missing, because this, sober, there is no one to push it,” I heard once to affirm a neighbor. Musician and talented writer, one of many who could never raise his head in our surroundings. He died a few years ago, but every day, when I looked out, I remember his words more.