After the Pandemic, the Non-Life of Cuba

By Irina Pino

HAVANA TIMES – During the pandemic, we locked ourselves in, afraid of everything, even meeting with our friends. However, I was able to dedicate myself to writing and finished a book. That book has a rather dark and depressing tone, but it’s what was lived.

After the experience of confinement, the little we had started to crumble, first with the so-called monetary unification, when they eliminated the CUC, and we had to exchange it for national currency.

Then they created the MLC, and people who had dollars at home went to the bank to put them into that card in order to buy in state stores with that magnetic currency. I call it invisible currency. It only works to buy in that type of store.

Currently, they are opening stores in dollars, where you can pay with another card or cash. It’s a back-and-forth game, but what the government really wants is foreign currency. The national currency and shit are the same. Imagine that a pack of cigarettes can cost up to 800 pesos (half of many pensions).

The latest thing to come up are the “Mypimes”, private stores, where everything costs an arm and a leg.

Here I will list all the negative things that followed the pandemic:

1. The city is getting more and more disgusting; the streets aren’t cleaned like before when a truck would pass with big brushes and spraying water.
2. Trash stays overflows from the bins for days and weeks.
3. There are many streets where sewage looks like a river.
4. There is neglect of monuments and public works that are falling apart, like the Amadeo Roldan Theater and the social clubs of the western beaches.
5. Parks are vandalized, and the benches are taken away entirely.
6. Trash divers have proliferated, going through the trash and spreading it all over the ground.
7. Vandalism with the trash bin covers. They take them to the clandestine factories where they make clotheslines and containers for storing food.
8. Public services don’t help citizens but increase bureaucracy and indifference.
9. Gasoline prices have tripled, with long lines to get it.
10. Hospitals lack the supplies and medicines that patients need.
11. Medicines are imported at high prices to be sold on the black market.
12. There’s a shortage of doctors at family clinics.
13. Pharmacies are short on medications, especially controlled prescriptions.
14. Public transportation is insufficient, almost nonexistent.
15. Aggressiveness between citizens.
16. Lack of solidarity between citizens.
17. A new social class has appeared, the private business owners, who flaunt a high standard of living.
18. The ration book is almost symbolic due to the lack of food products.
19. Criminal activities are on the rise, and squatters are occupying vacant buildings.
20. Iconic hotels have closed.
21. New hotels have been built but are almost empty due to the lack of tourism.
22. Bookstores as important as Moderna Poesía have disappeared, along with others.
23. Bad taste and noise pollution spread with the worst kind of music (if reggaeton can even be called music).
24. Portals and garages have become small second-hand clothing shops and other merchandise.
25. New construction with no aesthetic value harm the city’s urban planning.
26. Doctors, other professionals, and young graduates are leaving their careers to work in private businesses.
27. Ridiculously low pensions, which aren’t enough to buy even a carton of 30 eggs.
28. Agro-markets and popular fairs with abusive prices.
29. Price hikes at recreational spots.
30. Streets with potholes and no lighting, dangerous to walk at night.
31. Deterioration of thermoelectric plants.
32. Energy crisis.
33. Blackouts lasting several hours multiple days a week.
34. Mass exodus, greater than the Mariel Boatlift of the 80s, and the rafters of the 90s. Not only ordinary citizens are leaving, but also cultural figures and even former military personnel.

If anyone wants to add other issues to the list, I invite them to do so, as surely there are many more. The only truth is that decay increases by the day. The urgent solution is to lock oneself in and create a micro-world to survive this disaster. Someone told me that Cuba should be renamed and baptized as “Latent Chaos.”

Read more from the diary of Irina Pino here.