Havana Cuba. – What are they going to close? Nicaragua It is like saying that the Coco or the Apocalypse is coming. From time to time rumors about the possibility explode, and with them the mess of those who still cannot raise the money to emigrate or who lack some procedure, some paperwork, to start the journey.
Undecided and desperate, they run, anticipating that the door will close giving way to the trap, or that another rumor will come true that from 2023 the passport will cost twice as much. Those who are left behind this mass exodus It is precisely those Cuban men and women for whom a peso more or a peso less does count, and a lot.
Dollarization is a fact, inflation is not receding, and it is already evident that the regime has led us all to swim, and sink, in the waters of high prices and trade in MLC (Freely Convertible Currency)while state salaries will barely continue to serve to prolong this illusion of pretending that the labor force in Cuba is not the most pitiful endowment of slaves of the 21st century.
Because “fighting” real money in Cuba (that is, the currency that has value wherever we move inside or outside the Island), is very difficult and only a few find it relatively easy; but of these, most have been on the other side of the pond for a while, while the less fortunate fight a tiring battle daily where anything is worth it to be victorious, taking into account that triumph is not only achieving a certain amount of money but also using it in escaping.
Thus, fleeing not only because emigrating has been the purpose of raising capital, but because the ways and strategies to obtain it are most of the time not legal and it is compulsory to commit a crime, of the thousands of peaceful and violent ways in which violates the law and expresses human nature; so that once the money has slipped into your pocket you have to run to try to save yourself from police punishment or settling scores.
“I’ll do whatever it takes to get out of here” is like the phrase of the moment, and I’ve heard it from several Cuban men and women on the street, from friends and neighbors, sometimes jokingly and other times very seriously, with all the drama that comes with despair, reveal to you how far they have gone in their careers—in their scruples—to escape, and even to survive from day to day.
Also on social networks, in the form of complaints, there are testimonies of how tense and violent these months have been for Cubans, especially when the excessive expenses of December have been combined with the wave of migration and galloping misery.
Although reports of crimes whose motive has been to appropriate the belongings of others have multiplied throughout the year —brutal murders already for stealing a motorcycle or by an old pack horse, even for a mobile phone— these days of December are the ones that add the most reasons to our fears of going out long before nightfall and even opening the door of the house to the stranger who knocks in broad daylight.
And listening only to the most recent stories from the area where I live, in which it is said of an old woman who was murdered to steal a gas bullet, and of another who saved her life but was deceived by the thief disguised as a doctor, of group ambushes on roads and dark corners, of companies where the managers have disappeared with the workers’ wages and of parents who rent their bodies or those of their children, and of children who deceive their parents to sell the family home, I begin to think about those other deformed faces, stained with blood, that are also part of the exodus of these days, as well as how much perversity there can be in some who, by virtue of what they have stolen, “celebrate” for the year that is ending.
Scams, robberies, embezzlement from companies, assaults, prostitution and even political pretenses in order to satisfy hunger or, as an apotheosis, achieve that goal that the regime itself has included in the “design” of a death trap called the “Cuban economy”. and that requires that, in order to subsist decently, each family has at least one sender of remittances from abroad.
Seen this way, it is not difficult to understand that it is the system itself that, by causing material and human misery and encouraging exodus, in a forced way, also encourages the violation of its laws, while eating, pretending to live a “normal life” and emigrating. For the majority of Cubans, it implies committing crimes, sometimes against the ethical-moral values of the individuals themselves.
But in Cuba we live all the time in extreme situations where not only our moral training is put to the test but also human nature itself and, consequently, for many values are like a garment that is used or discarded according to the moment, more when it comes to safety. And filling your stomach and leaving Cuba is about that, more about the “instinct for conservation” than about a matter of elective freedom.
OPINION ARTICLE
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