Finding Things Out of Place
HAVANA TIMES – Many years ago, I heard a joke by the Argentine comedy group Les Luthiers that struck me as somewhat fitting for Cuba. As I remember it, the joke went more or less like this: “Older people want to be from Europe. Young people, from the United States. How can a country function when everyone feels out of place?” Something very similar happens to us on the Island. The vast majority of us wish we were somewhere else, in different circumstances, living different realities…
But now the crisis has become so overwhelming that this no longer applies only to people, but to things themselves. For example, people have stopped buying cooking oil. Instead, they buy pork to make use of the fat, because the price of oil has become extremely high.
Cooking oil is now being bought by drivers to keep their cars running. It has become fuel. They say it doesn’t harm vehicles and gets them running without much trouble. Gasoline, after all, is another product that has become unaffordable because of its price.
Meanwhile, the state pharmacies, which sell medicines when they are allocated supplies, have also become places where people can obtain the alcohol needed to light their wood- and charcoal-burning stoves, which are what people have increasingly been cooking with lately. There is simply no way—good or bad—to obtain alcohol elsewhere. Nor is kerosene easy to find.
At pharmacies, people buy things like bluing or camphorated rubbing alcohol to help start the fire that we humans discovered thousands of years ago and have used to prepare food ever since. I imagine that, in the same way, more than one aspect of our social dynamics is also being distorted. The most regrettable of all, and I agree with this view, is the distortion of our souls. That, too, can happen, because it has happened throughout history, and nowhere is it written that Cubans are somehow completely immune to such a collapse.
But the worst thing that could happen to us, I believe, would be to surrender entirely to hopelessness. The struggle for subsistence will have to be accompanied by that light, however faint, no matter how much we see things changing for the worse—or even for the very worst. And, of course, this is no easy task for anyone. But we will have to keep reinventing each day, however absurd it may seem to us. Because what is at stake is what we call survival.
Read more from the diary of Lien Estrada here on Havana Times.