Staying Functional Amid Cuba’s Dystopia
HAVANA TIMES – For health reasons, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I can barely leave the house. Still, I sometimes spend long stretches sitting on my front porch, watching people come and go. Since I live across from a park, this coming and going tends to have certain peculiarities: children playing, young people falling in love, people exercising, others walking their pets, groups of young people chatting. A few days ago, I found myself wondering how it was possible to remain functional amid all the adversity we are experiencing.
Imagine how, after long hours of a blackout, including a night with hardly any sleep, a person can get up and go to work, or a child can go to school, or a young person to university. Add to that serious problems with the water supply, a shortage of liquefied gas for cooking, no transportation—in short, a whole litany of daily problems. The truth is that most people manage to remain functional and sane.
The young women I see walking past my house are generally nicely dressed, clean, and well-groomed; you can even tell that some have been to the hairdresser. Those who are dirty and unkempt are the ones who have always been that way. The same goes for older women. People are overwhelmed, anxious, and angry. Give them any opportunity and they complain and lash out at the government and its representatives, but they maintain a commendable degree of sanity and dignity.
The school year began recently, and I see children going to school as always. At what point does a mother find the time to wash and iron their uniforms? The fact is that most of the children I see are clean and presentable. I even see young people passing by my house on weekends, dressed up and looking their best for a night out or a party. There’s no electricity, no transportation, and countless other difficulties, but people are still there, “struggling,” as we say in good Cuban fashion.
Also across from the park, but on the street parallel to mine, there is a restaurant that turns into a disco on Sundays from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. Not even when the SEN (National Electric Power System) has collapsed has it stopped putting on its show. The entire country may be in darkness, but the disco keeps going. From my front porch, I can hear the music perfectly, and since they mostly play music from the eighties and nineties, I listen to it and it takes my mind off things. I even enjoy it.
I have a student, an automation engineering major, who came over several days in a row to study for his Programming make-up exam. His father always brought him on a motorcycle. He told me that they hadn’t had running water at home for months. I never saw either him or his father dirty or poorly dressed. Later, he told me that they got their water from a rather makeshift water truck that came every other day and filled their tanks for the “modest” sum of 3,000 pesos, (almost a monthly minimum wage).
Many people have managed to get rechargeable fans and lamps and adjust their schedules to the hours when electricity is available. Others, the more privileged, have acquired an EcoFlow, solar panels with inverters, or a small generator adapted to run on piped gas. Of course, these are individual solutions, and the solution to the crisis cannot depend on what each person is able to work out for themselves. The fact remains that, amid all this agony, people continue to function and try to live as normal a life as possible.
The lack of basic services cannot be normalized. The shortage of food and medicine cannot be normalized. But there is no denying the ingenuity, the desire to live, and the spirit shown by most people in confronting the crisis.