LAS TUNAS, Cuba. — This Thursday, with three days to go until the May Day parade, the bakeries in Port Padre They woke up closed, as the gate of the municipal warehouse of the food industry also remains closed this morning.
“There is no flour,” says a sign written in chalk on the glass of one of the windows of the La Plaza bakery, while a Cuban flag hangs in the next window with a poster allegorical to the date that reads “Cuba lives and works”.
Today, in Puerto Padre, hundreds of people, including children and the elderly, did not have bread for breakfast. Like so many bakeries, La Plaza remained closed almost all day because there was no flour.
Crossing the street, in the “Plaza de la Revolución”, workers and directors of Health, Education, Commerce and other official institutions, with flags and banners, speeches and slogans, posters and banners, prepare to celebrate the Day of the Workers, competing with each other, to show off their histrionic skills in the parade.
While a teacher modeled a historical-political class next to a royal palm, on the other side of the square, under an almond tree, health workers They performed their choreography a few steps from employees of the Commerce department, who, in the shade of an oak tree and waving their flags, happily replied to doctors and paramedics saying: “without Commerce there is no maternal program”, alluding to rationed products. and by them distributed to mothers with small children.
A palm tree, an almond tree and an oak planted in a public square served as a shelter for these comedians while in the Cuban countryside there are not enough arms to finish off the marabou, which every day invades more arable land. Not to mention the markets, where agricultural products are scarce and outrageously expensive.
Everyone to the Plaza?
Despite the crisis in Cuba — without food and with an almost unprecedented mass exodus — no one should be surprised if hundreds of people parade on May Day.
I learned from a state employee that, in order to “corroborate” the workers’ attendance at official acts, and the administrations, through the official unions, are interviewing and even visiting the workers at their homes, in an act of manifest coercion .
Then, it is not surprising that, without having had breakfast today, there are already state employees in Puerto Padre preparing to “celebrate” Workers’ Day. It is likely that even former government employees and executives based outside the island are nostalgic for the Castro parades on May Day. Let’s see if they get to celebrate it in Miami.
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