HAVANA, Cuba.-As an individual or group initiative, as an altruistic gesture with neighbors, several people have decided to cook and give food to those most in need. Two hurricanes devastating events—one in the East and one in the West—several tremors of land very close to where the waters and landslides left little more than a dozen fatalities, accidental and scheduled blackouts for several days, added to an economy that collapsed as a result of improvised and ruthless policies, have fueled popular discontent in many, as well as compassion in others.
The news on the official sites of the regime praises the action of some people from Santiago who donated four hundred portions of food, as well as another family from Artemisa who cooked free of charge for more than a hundred victims.
They publish it with the intention of taking credit for the feat, of capitalizing on the gesture in favor of shoring up an image of the Revolution that is increasingly deteriorating, but they do so, above all, trying to make people forget that precisely those who have a little more come to to offer charity because they are aware of the helplessness and impudence of the Government, although some refuse to say so to the cameras, more because they know that open criticism of the dictatorship can frustrate the charity initiative (and the immediate objective is to help, not confront to the political police).
Faced with the inaction and the premise of “zero gratuities” of Castroism, good-hearted Cubans—beyond ideologies and creeds—have had no choice but to help each other, knowing that it would be in vain to wait for that the Communist Party decides to offer real and free help to those poor people that they never dare to call properly and that, therefore, they camouflage under the euphemism of “people in vulnerable situations.”
Not because that relieves them or helps them bear the shame of having impoverished with bad intentions to an entire country – as a strategy of political control – but because they insist on continuing to deceive the world with the terrifying fantasy of the “humanist” essence of communism and the vocation of service of its rulers and institutions, when the reality is that even in situations of crisis, of catastrophe, they do not loosen their pockets since the construction of socialism, according to the experience lived by Cubans for more than half a century, requires, in the first instance, the implementation of the most primitive capitalism and ruthless that can exist.
Those who, by sacrificing remittances and personal earnings, help their poor neighbors do so because they know that after paying the Ministry of Internal Trade a “donation” cushion of around 800 pesos, in addition to going into debt again with the state bank to acquire the construction materials with which they must repair the home “with their own efforts”, those who receive a salary or a pension, no matter how high they may be, will not have money left to feed themselves, much less for medicines and clothes.
They do it because they are sure that their neighbors and their children will die of hunger and despair if someone does not face as a personal action the responsibility that the regime does not assume as an obligation, even when the pretext to convince citizens that political repression is necessary , that democracy is dangerous, because only a communist system can guarantee that “no one is left helpless.”
The most basic and immediate question of those who in these circumstances of crisis manage to see the naked king, of those who discover the lie by which they have lived poorly from sacrifice to sacrifice without seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, is precisely why these State institutions of the “humanist system” are not capable of offering free food, even a little rice and pumpkin, to those millions of Cubans who are hungry, or at least to those thousands who now add the other to the calamity of an empty stomach. of being left homeless.
Why are there those who, of their own free will, can take away what they have to offer to the helpless and why does the system that has forced them to abide by the contract of submission in exchange for attending to their needs always condemn them to helplessness?
What good are socialism and communism if when they need food and shelter they make fun of them by charging them for donations and sending them a “guaguandunga” (an old and dilapidated Girón bus with loudspeakers), an eyesore that could be the most perfect materialization of the bungling of an obsolete, noisy, unnecessary and hypocritical dictatorship, since it is capable of allocating oil and an electric generator to its ideological propaganda but not a cent to serve a simple soup for free.
The cyclones and the earthquake have left thousands of Cubans completely helpless, and as if the misfortune were not enough, that same Government (with that same bank that changed its name to avoid a lawsuit in London), that communism that in the midst of a pandemic of Covid-19 looted the citizen’s savings with the inopportune and criminal Ordering Task, now it returns with the circus of cornering with new debts. Because if people need to feed themselves to live, Castroism and its socialism under construction need poverty and calamities to justify ineptitude and camouflage ambitions.
