Havana, Cuba.- Pinar del Río was happy these days, and one is also happy because there are few joys that fall to that province, rightly baptized as “La Cinderella of Cuba.” Everyone who has been to Pinar knows that it is depressing territory, that decadence has even reached Viñales, Cayo Jutia and any other site that, until recently, received some attention from the government to attract tourism.
In Cuba there are other equally sad provinces. It could be said that all of Cuba is a retreat of misery and boredom; but the economic backwardness, the ugliness and the tedium of Pinar del Río, being so close to Havana, are such that one seems to have gone back in time to fall into a desperate nothing.
The province of tobacco, mogotes and Polo Montañés is today poorer than ever. The drop in tourism due to the Covid-19 pandemic has been added to the impact of natural phenomena on tobacco production, a sector that generates millions and from which, however, the province benefited -according to the authorities-, but not the workers.
When Hurricane Ian devastated Pinar del Río in September 2022, it affected around one hundred thousand homes, which resulted in a lot of families being left out in the open, or at the mercy of the charity of their relatives, friends and neighbors. Thousands more homes to be built on the backlog of hundreds more, destined for the victims of hurricanes that devastated the western end of Cuba at the beginning of this century. Thousands of homeless people, in a context that was already empty of food, medicine, clothes, shoes and hope.
That’s how poor Pinar is, a Cinderella who has no remedy, just as Cuba does not. However, these days some people from Pinar del Río have shown that enthusiasm that was so missed on March 26, the day of the “elections” of deputies to the National Assembly of People’s Power.
the rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine visited the province to record the theme “Living legend”, in rural localities of shocking poverty. The artist walked around there distributing dollars, but calm down; No throwing them like he did from his room at the Grand Packard Hotel, in Havana’s Prado, causing such a stir that the dictatorship had to cut off the Internet connection.
In Pinar, the rapper left baby boys from hand to hand, to people who shamelessly asked for them, and to others who, with pity in their eyes, accepted the money. As life is in Cuba, a hundred dollars solves a few things. Of dignity, better not to speak.
Tekashi’s visit once again revealed the total disposition of Castroism – or Diazcanelism – to profit from whatever, to prostitute every last feature of the idiosyncrasy, history and present of Cubans. Tekashi walked through crowds with the Cuban flag draped over his shoulders, and no policeman or official appeared to stop him.
The official press, which made very serious accusations about Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara when she used the national banner for her performance, she is still mute. The people from Pinar del Río who ran after the rapper probably don’t know who Luis Manuel is, nor should they know who Anniette González is, a Camagüeyan woman who the same government that turns a blind eye to Tekashi is accusing of insulting the national symbols, for covering up his body with the flag to remember the more than a thousand political prisoners rotting in the jails of this country.
It is hardly worth talking about such inconsistencies, or pointing out that Tekashi 6ix9ine -gang member, trafficker, criminal- has been admitted to a Cuba that so many good men and women cannot enter, exiled for their political ideas.
The regime is determined to sell the misery in which we live. That poverty that abounds in the video clip, equally covering children, the elderly, houses, domestic animals, the unhappy Rocinante and the cart that the rapper picturesquely drove, is a product that from now on will be used to attract profits at the cost of inspiring pity.
Cuba begs and that hurts us. Alms in full color, so that the destitution that communism has generated in the territory where one of the main exportable items of the country is manufactured is clearly seen.
The Cuban regime no longer cares that the misery of the Revolution is seen in all corners of the planet. But it could work for him that other artists, like Tekashi, confuse extreme poverty with simplicity and come to record videos, pay the State the corresponding rights and, incidentally, give away some tickets to that malnourished and ragged town of which Díaz-Canel and the National Assembly have never taken up, nor will they ever do so.
OPINION ARTICLE
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