A few years ago I published that article that some friends remind me of occasionally. In a coffee place-state-run as all were at the time, I found several offers to satiate my hunger as a perennial chubby by choice I am. There was a difficulty, the option didn’t include any liquid. “The detergent is at fault, mate.” I remember that was the explanation. And I wondered aloud first, newspaper pages later, something very simple: “How do I help swallowing the bread?”
I also used the example of a fact that seemed a caricature but it was a naked truth. In the central Havana corner of 23 and 12 (a few steps from the famous cafe “The Ball”) they were selling bread and cream cheese too. The two products were sold separately. The bureaucratic logic did not reach the almost inevitable next step: assign an employee to open the loaves and put inside the creamy dairy product.
The hunger of people crowding the area began to be guided by a dynamic much more human and they took the packaging of the cheese, opened the bread with their bare hands and (for lack of paper and not in a good mood because of the nonsense) they threw the paper on the floor. There were falls on the way towards the bus stop and my lone complaint, which found no destination because as it used to in such cases, “the manager is in a meeting.”
Now – exactly one year without being in Cuba-I get news about updates, cooperatives, inaugurations. The Lay Space Magazine I find an interesting article where explodes the concern on that we will go to the other end and the new owners will mistreat their employees or capitalism-as absent as denigrated for decades-will sprout undesirable strength.
I share the essence of that alarm but first I think we’ve been so many years without having put the cheese on the bread, decades without knowing how not to choke, those who have put their mouths on the dust covering a lukewarm can of soda or beer, and even the grown and aged in this neglect, abuse and everyday inefficiency have the propensity to vote for the changes.
And if someone lines his pockets let it be a better landlord or a cooperative of people who offer good service. I prefer the creditworthiness of a new type entrepreneur before that of the lackadaisical waiter of golden mouth. Gold teeth became uniform working in places with “aid” for the employee’s pocket without any requirement of efficiency. It is preferable to require restraint in the new type manager that continue to live together always with the always-in-a-meeting manager, the one fertile not in schemes like Ulysses but in moving phrases full of impunity and rhetoric. There is no place to hide behind “we have limitations,” “I was not oriented”, “we raise this issue.” Where did you raise it, my partner, that is not seen anywhere nor the solution nor respect for consumers?
I know many have been and are honest and industrious, but in this kind of character abounds pink color that does not flinch when he sees a unprotected gray face that is complaining, the extra pounds even in moments of weight loss and desperation for shortages.
As the topic of the night is darker when dawn approaches, new economic times we live Cuba is logical to accompany them with the fervent clinging to the rhetoric: “We have no guidance,” “no way, mate, that’s not content in my work. ”
It is not just about “bread with something”, warm cans or absent glasses. One time I left the film production team for one of these practices of Real Socialism. I said at the end: “Here what happens is that it becomes so authorized, the rules set forth, the accepted. And illustrating with an example close to cinema: when needed for a scene a table and four chairs we realized that we couldn’t buy the table… “. Chairs, yes, no problem with chairs. Well, instead of what the characters and the film needed, 8 chairs were purchased and since there wasn’t authorization to acquire a table it was not used in the film. After a couple of years, when one of the 6 pieces lying around ke, someone says: “And what did we buy those chairs for?”
I would ask Cubans aged between 15 and 75 years. Does it remind you of something? Does this ring a bell for you? Are not you tired of that ineffective litany?
