Not Even the Tips for the Cuban Government
HAVANA TIMES – I walked into a state-run store to see what new items they had in stock. The only other customer was a woman who had bought a couple fans and was waiting for the clerk to give her the correct change. He was frantically searching for the coins he owed her. He apologized, saying he had only just started making sales and didn’t have enough change yet.
The woman replied, “If I knew it was for you, I wouldn’t mind tipping. The problem is that this government gets to keep it. Try to make it to a dollar by the end of the day and keep it for yourself.”
When I heard her comment, I felt something like joy, camaraderie, solidarity… I wasn’t alone.
Almost all my dealings are with private individuals—people of flesh and blood like me—not with representatives of a political structure that I see as manipulative and exploitative. It is a system under which I feel I suffer.
I remember that whenever I received dollars, sent by family or friends abroad, I would sell them at the same exchange rate as CADECA (Cuba’s official currency exchange offices) to people I found waiting at the end of the lines outside those exchange houses. Whenever I need to buy something, I first check private businesses. I only turn to state-run stores when I have no other choice. Because part of the struggle against the regime that I have chosen to embrace is refusing to cooperate beyond what is absolutely necessary.
And now I hear someone say they don’t want even a single cent ending up in the hands of this government. Her words felt like a breath of fresh air. They made me feel accompanied in my decision not to support a system that, if we want to live with dignity, offers us no option except to leave the land where we were born.
It is a system where the common greeting has become, “At least we’re still breathing.” A system where, when you read the newspaper and see references to the “176 economic and social transformations,” you simply cannot believe any of it, much less feel any hope.
Because the chaos has only deepened after all the Communist Party’s guidelines, congresses, and measures supposedly enacted “for the people.” The collapse has reached such extreme levels that a pension of 4,000 pesos is no longer enough to buy even a single liter of cooking oil, which now costs between 4,500 and 6,000 pesos.
I wonder how much longer a government can remain in power under such conditions, when those it governs increasingly see it as the worst of the corrupt systems dominating society.
And I keep finding more evidence that I am not the only one who thinks and acts this way. Anyone can see the nightmarish reality facing Cuban society—not only by browsing social media, where it is constantly denounced, but simply by casually asking the people they meet on the streets, whether in Havana, Matanzas, Camagüey, Holguín, Las Tunas, Santiago, or anywhere else.
It’s not just me saying it.
Read more from the diary of Lien Estrada here on Havana Times.