Sancti Spiritus/The queue began to form before full dawn, when the sun barely touched the low roofs, on the road to Zaza. In front of the winery, the murmur grew as quickly as the news spread: “chicken and rice arrived at the end of the year.” For many, the phrase sounded almost unreal. In Sancti Spíritus, where the ration book has been emptying, seeing dozens of people gathered outside one of these businesses seems like a scene from another time. “It’s been so long since something came, that this queue surprised me,” he tells 14ymedio Cristina, a neighbor of the area.
The wait takes place between comments, calculations and careful monitoring of the shift. Nobody wants to lose their place. Some arrive by bicycle, others drag a makeshift cart; There are those who, standing for hours, sit on a wall for a while to relieve their legs. A pound of rice costs 155 pesos and chicken 20, a price below agricultural markets and MSMEs.
When the sale begins, the winemaker weighs, writes down and gets paid. From the door, someone watches each movement carefully, as if the collective eye could correct the balance. “Here you have to be on top of everything, because you get careless and lose out,” says a retiree who arrives with his notebook folded in his shirt pocket. The man says that a friend who bought earlier, when he got home, noticed a shortage. “Of the two pounds he was given of chicken, they had taken half a pound.”
“Here you have to be on top of everything, because you get careless and lose out,” says a retiree
The queue is repeated in other neighborhoods of the city. The supply reactivates an almost forgotten ritual: that of going to the warehouse and leaving with something tangible, however, the sale is not enough to erase the long months of scarcity. The rice arrives in sacks with names from a distant country; the chicken, in irregular, pale pieces, with more bone and fat than meat in some cases. Even so, no one rejects what they get. It’s not much, you have to wait hours to purchase it, but it represents a relief at a time of year when family dinners and modest celebrations are prepared.
In the queue they talk about December 31 with a mixture of resignation and pragmatism. “This isn’t dinner, but it helps,” says one woman as she mentally calculates how to stretch the rice and chicken. Others remember that, a while ago, the end of the year was accompanied by more ambitious expectations. Now, the celebration adjusts to the size of the box.
As evening falls, the winery closes and the line dissolves. In homes, rice is carefully stored and chicken is distributed in calculated portions. Sancti Spíritus closes the day with that well-known ambiguous feeling: that of having received something and, at the same time, that of continuing to wait.
