HAVANA.- In recent years, and even more so, in recent weeks, after lby executive order of President Donald Trump that has the Castro regime on the ropes, I hear from many compatriots who, in the face of the current hardships and desolation, yearn, like a lost paradise, for the 1980s.
The majority of those who idealize and long for that time are the same old people who repeat the refrain that “with Fidel these things did not happen” and those who proclaimed themselves communists until they collapsed due to hunger during the Special Period and today, disoriented, they do not know which creed to adhere to.
There are many who miss the times of scholarships in Moscow, kyiv, Leningrad; CAME contracts to work as semi-slaves in Czechoslovakia or East Germany; the unbreakable Poljot watches, the VEF, Meridian and Selena radios; Aurika washing machines, Akkord and Melodyia record players; the Moskvich, Ladas and Polski for the privileged who were authorized to buy them. They miss trips to the USSR as prizes from the 9550 program, cans of Russian meat and Bulgarian stuffed cabbages, with plenty of celery, and Stolishnaya vodka in the parallel markets.
It seems that they also long for basic, non-basic toys directed, once a year, by the industrial products notebook; the hake, the horse mackerel, the half pound of beef per person who came to the butcher shop every nine days for the supply book; pizza at $1.20 and beer at 60 cents; the bedspread and the pots that were sold to the newlyweds in the store at the Palace of Marriage. There is no longer the tourist return to Cuba for 250 pesos and trips to the socialist countries of Eastern Europe for 1,500 pesos; the Yumurí shirts, the Jiquí pants, or the Jordache jeans that the inmates of Manto Negro assembled; the Chinese Golden Cup tennis shoes, the Moscow Red perfume…
Also the film series at the Cinemateca, Saturdays at La Rampa, the flavors of the three graces and the ice cream salads of Coppeliathe Victrola from Las Cañitas, the Galeón cologne, the Fiesta deodorant, the Polinesio, La Torre, the frozen beers from El Conejito, the Sandunguera and the Buey Cansado dance from Los Van Van, José Antonio Méndez and his guitar at the Pico Blanco in Saint John, the Varadero Festivals, the New Latin American Cinema and Jazz Plaza when they were real.
The existence of the needy that we have today makes many fall into the traps of memory and feel nostalgic for the prosperity of that time. If we don’t feel it was so bad, it was because then it was not as evident – as it is today – the audacity of the bosses and the gap between the official discourse and reality.
It is appropriate to remind those nostalgic people that the bonanza was not as much as they want to evoke it. Long before the monetary duality, the economic reorganization and the current rampant inflation, the salary was not enough either and it was a common practice to steal from jobs to make ends meet.
Possession of dollars was a crime that was punishable by years in prison, as was dealing with foreigners to buy something from you in those diplomatic stores where we couldn’t even get close to the curtained windows.
The university was only for revolutionaries and the CDR snitches monitored the neighbors and granted or did not grant endorsements for reliable job positions.
In those “happy 80s”, thousands of Cubans died or were maimed in Angola for the greater glory of the Commander in Chief who played war by remote control from his Havana bunker.
In the prisons, in Dantesque conditions, there were hundreds of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience
Many forgetful intellectuals say they miss “the active cultural life” of the 80s, the many events, the debates on the artistic level that distanced themselves from the cultural policy of the State. They forgot the paranoid suspicion of the regime in those years against the creators, to whom the use of a flood of symbols, similes and metaphors was not of much use. Don’t you remember the closed exhibitions and how Arte Calle ended, the brutal aggression of MININT agents disguised as civilians against a group of intellectuals, among whom was the poet Carilda Olivergathered for a poetry reading in a bookstore in Matanzas, in 1988, the police attacks against freakies and rockers?
If that had been an idyllic time, the embassy of peru In Havana, in April 1980, it would not have been packed to the roof and the tops of the trees in just hours with the more than ten thousand people fleeing the revolutionary Eden, nor would several thousand more have left through Mariel in just four months, after declaring themselves worms, whores, faggots, criminals, antisocials, scum, anything they were required to declare themselves, anyone in order to escape. And that, despite the barbarism unleashed by the mobs incited by the regime.
Was a decade happy that began with the repudiation rallies of the summer of 1980 and concluded with the purges in the MININT and the executions of Cause One in June 1989?
That decade started badly and ended worse, wherever we place its end. It doesn’t matter if instead of 1989, we place it in 1987, when Fidel Castro embarked on the path diametrically opposed to Perestroika in a so-called “process of rectification of errors and negative trends”, announcing, to the bewilderment of everyone, “now we are going to build socialism.”
From that moment on, the counters of stores and markets began to be emptied; Salaries reached less, because the standards for those who worked “tied” and “due to adjustment” increased; and the police launched a raid against “the potters”, “the merolics”, the artisans of the Cathedral Square and “the bandits of Río Frío”, the nickname that Fidel Castro used against the sellers of the peasant markets.
And so the 80s ended, with the end of the Soviet subsidy, and we entered the Special Period, listening to the bosses, like today, demanding sacrifices and repeating their slogans that speak of death as an alternative to the socialism of greedy cronies that is remaining from the willful Fidelista project.
There are always those who, when they hear me say that all the disaster of today is today is a result of what was and the way it was, also in the 80s, accuse me of being resentful, and of wanting to remember only the bad and the worst. They are right about the latter: there is very little good that I remember, and it was not thanks to the revolution, but in spite of it. And yes, I am resentful, and I am glad that I am: this way it will be more difficult for them to make me accept a fraudulent exchange and to make a fool of me.
