Havana Cuba. – There is no talk of another issue in Cuba other than leaving the country. People are leaving by the thousands in what may soon become the largest and longest wave of migration since the Mariel boatlift. It is not an exodus like any other, it is a general stampede.
So serious is the situation that if only a couple of years ago the regime was only afraid of “population aging” and “low birth rates”, as factors that put at risk any hint of “economic prosperity”, for a few months they have added to their fears the real possibility of “depopulation”, with which the game becomes harder for them not because they are left without people to submit, but because it means the almost total absence of labor, with which all the dreamed ” development plans” for 2030 will go to… right there where we are thinking.
And if there will be no one to lift Hotelsgolf courses, water parks, marinas and everything that helps to bring in money (not tourists), there will not be the ideal balance between senders and receivers of remittances for an efficient hostage mechanism to provide them with “political stability”.
Before, but even more so during the Obama thaw, it became blatantly noticeable that emigration was being used by the regime as an economic and political strategy in which each family, in order to survive in Cuba, was forced —rather pressured— to create among its members at least one issuer of remittances.
That macabre formula worked as a kind of “subliminal pact” in which both the outsider and the insider made an effort to maintain the status quo.
But the plan is getting out of control. The “political stability” of which the communists boast, as well as the “economic prosperity” that they had to dream of by 2030, were based precisely, among other things, on that system of “closed mouths”, of “don’t worry, you look prettier ”, which is achieved when both those who go abroad and those who stay (mostly like pigeons with their beaks open), that is, the remittance sender and the remittance recipient or indirect beneficiary, depend on remaining “faithful” to the system to feel “privileged” (because they can access better food, better housing, greater access to services in hard currency) in the midst of so much misery. It’s painful but that’s how it is. This is what we became after so many years kidnapped by power.
But now that “balance” of fewer senders of remittances and a greater number of remittances is breaking with each family that has proposed to emigrate in its entirety, that is, including all the members in the getaway. Because a remittance or any amount of money that reaches us by any means, and however much it may be, does not stay in the pocket, under the mattress or on the bank card to “make purchases” (in a totally out of stock and too boring) but the most intelligent and definitive use that can be given to it is to pay (whatever) for a one-way trip.
In Cuba, families are selling their houses, cars, businesses (legal or not, it matters little in a country where everything works so crazy) just enough to escape. Anyone realizes when seeing the auction prices on the internet, of evident desperation. Because at any moment the last doors open to freedom will begin to close as the negative effects of the upheaval begin to be felt “up there”.
Everything is going wrong for the paunchy elite, terribly wrong. The money is gushing out of them at a time when —just as they planned for that 2030 that no one is saying anything anymore—, it should be in sufficient quantity not to “build socialism” (that joke is already more than spent) but to definitively settle so much old debt that does not allow them to agree and access new debts.
I don’t know if the same thing happens in other neighborhoods beyond mine, but I don’t find anyone among my close neighbors who doesn’t have the idea of ”getting out” among their immediate plans, as well as a shadow of faith that “the thing” (well, so we say of this crazy reality in which we are sinking) can improve, even though it could be assumed by so many music festival and many shirts with Che Guevara for the 60 years of the UJC, that nothing is happening here.
Well, it does happen, and the worst (or perhaps the best) is that for tens of thousands they continue to run until they run into the other bank of the Rio Grande.
There are no figures, neither official nor reliable, but we know, from what is happening around us, that it is a true stampede where only those who no longer have the opportunity, strength or time to start again will be left behind, because of having them and not using them to flee would be acting more like idiots than crazy.
We Cubans are taking off wherever and under any pretext, grabbing onto anything that moves and passes by, slipping through the narrowest and darkest crack in this world as long as it takes us far away from the great nonsense in which turned Cuba into the hands of the Castro dynasty and its “continuity”.
Gentlemen, an entire country is definitely leaving, never to return to this place where having a simple glass of milk is today and will always be a feat.
What two or three decades ago was a fantasy from which the phrase “the last one to turn off the Morro” was coined, at this time it seems that we will see it come true and very soon, judging by how overwhelmed the capacities of the foreign consulates in Havana to manage the hundreds of visa applications they receive daily, due to the traffic jams of Cubans in the region’s airports, which has led several countries to tighten their transit conditions for Cuban travelers, and because and very few hide to say openly that they are leaving or that they are not coming back, even that they are stealing and “fighting” with both hands, whatever and wherever, to make the money with which to “go to see the volcanoes”.
OPINION ARTICLE
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