Getting Glasses in Cuba

by Elio Delgado Valdes

HAVANA TIMES — I am 55 years old and I’ve been using glasses ever since I was 30. It’s always been the same story for Cubans, getting your assigned time to get your eyesight checked at the polyclinic can take a good while.

You have to wake up at the crack of dawn and even then, you’re not sure that you will be seen. There are many issues: the first, that the doctor comes to work, or that the place isn’t fumigated on that day, or whether the electric company has come to change an electricity pole or is checking that everything works OK, and thus no electricity. Pregnant women and children have priority, we don’t question that. In short, there are a lot of things that get in the way.

When you do manage to get a prescription for your glasses, the optician is supposed to have frames and lenses, but that’s often not the case; when there’s one, then the other one is missing…

I’m not lying to you; I went to the Almendrares opticians located in front of the Capitolio building, a central and accessible place. A very friendly lady with a beautiful smile told me, you’re lucky, we have lenses for this prescription. She bent down behind the desk and took out a cardboard box, pure underdevelopment, and began to poke around, taking frames in and out, some were nice and others were horrible.

Without losing her smile, she looked at me and said that I wasn’t in complete luck, that I shouldn’t get down and should come back next week. On Tuesday, because they receive goods on Monday and surely some frame will be of use to me, I shouldn’t say this to customers, but I don’t want you to come here in vain.

Like the good Cuban I am, I thanked her for her secret information whispering just as she had done with me. The following Tuesday, I went to the opticians, I was third in line, when they opened, they didn’t give us any news, we sat down and after waiting my turn, the beautiful smile on that lady’s face told me that I wasn’t lucky today, that they are doing an inventory, they have to categorize all the material. But don’t give up, come next Monday.

On Monday September 12, 2016, I was the first in line and I was lucky, they had frames, lenses, electricity and a woman with a beautiful smile who handed me a receipt after I paid her $51.15 regular Cuban pesos (just over 2 USD), but said come back in 20 days to pick them up.

A dreamer and never losing my hope, I went on the day she told me to, very kind the lady, she took out a huge book, looked it over for a long while and found the page which coincided with my number 174-H. She raised her eyes and without losing her incredible equanimity, she told me to come back in 15 days, there’s been a delay at the workshop…

This story is just one among many others; the same thing happens if you go to a pharmacy looking for a salbutamol inhaler for your child or if you go to your family doctor so that they can refer you to a specialist. There is always something which goes wrong so you have to keep on going, no matter how urgent it is. We are a society where we have lost respect for our fellow Cuban.

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