“Did you already get Oropouche?” I ask Yolexis in our first conversation of the week on WhatsApp. “They say that it’s all over Cuba right now,” I added.
“Solavaya, brother,” my Havana neighbor responds from a distance. “Don’t even mention that, because the way things are here, the worst thing would be if I also got that virus.”
“Some of Dania’s relatives who live in Cienfuegos got it and wiped them out,” he tells me. “It kept them in bed for several days, with very high fever and pain all over their bodies, and when it seemed that they were better, they started again, even vomiting.
“Look at the thing they call the Oropouche Ruperto, like the character in Vivir del Cuento, because when you’re getting over it, devastated, it comes back and affects you even more,” he adds.
“Ugh, that is really tough,” I worry. “Take good care of yourselves there, something like this is really serious.”
“Yes siree,” Yolexis reaffirms. “I don’t even want to imagine that my daughter gets it. Or Dania’s parents, who already have their ailments and could get complicated. And you know that ending in a hospital these days is a horror and mystery movie…”
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“The problem is that with the rain of the last few weeks, the mosquitoes are everywhere and, no matter how much you take care of yourself at home, if they don’t fumigate, we won’t solve anything,” he laments. “But if there is no fuel even for thermoelectric plants, there is even less for fumigation.”
“And, in short, is there Oropouche or not in Havana?” I ask.
“Not officially, you know… But of course, there is. It’s spread throughout the country, and with the amount of people who always travel to Havana, and more so in the summer, you can bet on it,” he reflects. “And, to top it off, there is also dengue, and that one is even more serious.”
“And you should see the trash, brother,” he tells me, “it’s much worse than when you left. Between that, the leaks and the puddles everywhere, the mosquitoes are happy. And the hurricane in the area let us off the hook…”
“Well yes,” I agree. “When I saw that Beryl was headed there, I was very worried. And I guess in Cuba people must have been holding their breath.”
“Of course, brother, if that Beryl enters Cuba, it will give us trouble. It became category 5, an animal. The truth is, we escaped by a hair,” Yolexis tells me, relieved.
“Just with what it had rained a few days before, a few buildings collapsed here in Havana. Just imagine with winds of 200 kilometers per hour,” he points out. “That happens just over a small part of Cuba and it sweeps us away: there are no roofs left standing, no electric poles, no banana trees, no nothing. A catastrophe.”
I hear his last word — a very Cuban quip that has become a common expression on the island due to daily hardships and disasters — and I can’t help but laugh, despite the dramatic nature of the situation. Yolexis hears me and does not ignore it.
“Don’t laugh, things are serious. You may be over there with the millionaire sheiks and the full supermarkets, but here the situation is getting tougher every day,” he reprimands me. “Imagine if the hurricane also wipes out what little is left…”
“If that happens then a bunch of bananas will cost 500 pesos and a pound of beans about a thousand, and pork at whatever the butchers want,” he warns.
“Terrible,” I managed to say, imagining how much I could buy at those prices with the money I officially earned in Cuba and how much so many Cubans could do, even without a hurricane, with a much lower salary and much more complicated family relationships. Like Yolexis himself.
“It’s what it is, as Piqué would say, but we have to continue, brother,” my neighbor responds with admirable fortitude, taking the opportunity to sneak in a reference to soccer, his declared crisis-proof passion.
“Now let’s see what happens with the capped prices that have just been announced, although I, to be honest, have no illusions,” he surprises me, returning to the issue of prices when I thought he would take the soccer route.
“True, they have already been announced,” I follow. “Things were quick because when they put the brakes on them last week they said they would continue analyzing it with the MSMEs. In any case, from what I read when the cap thing was leaked, almost no one seemed happy with it.”
“It’s just that price capping has never worked in Cuba, brother, everyone knows that,” Yolexis answers me. “The only thing the government has achieved when it has done it is that these products are lost and appear more expensive on the black market. Who can say that now it won’t be the same? In fact, they say it’s already happening in some places.”
“In addition,” he adds, “ the prices they set are quite high, I suppose so that the MSMEs would not complain too much. But most people don’t notice that, it doesn’t improve practically anything, and for MSMEs, even though they have removed customs duties, in the end, it is still an ‘armlock’.”
“If tomorrow the exchange for the dollar goes up, which luckily is now quite steady, or international chicken prices rise for whatever reason, the limited profit margin they have now will affect them. And what do you think is going to happen?” he reflects. “They are not going to sit back and lose money, because, at the end of the day, the investment is theirs, not the government’s.”
“That situation with the process is tremendous,” I tell him just from the other side of the screen, overwhelmed at the same time by its crude insight and by the possible implications that emerge from his analysis.
“This situation is like a saga longer than Star Wars,” Yolexis tells me, still in the spirit of joking. “I’ll tell you how things go and how my wallet is doing. Because anyway, even if a few prices are capped, there are a bunch of others that continue uphill, just like that, as happy as the mosquitoes. Thank goodness the hurricane didn’t hit us and headed down there, because if not…”
