Cuba’s New Scapegoat

Ariel Glaria Enriquez    

HAVANA TIMES — Ever since the government’s last push to allow a private sector in the Cuban economy, the controversy surrounding social indiscipline has intensified. Civil chaos, which stirs up the most heated critiques in all aspects of Cuban life, warns us about the phenomenon that goes beyond the limits artists and intellectuals conform to.

As if it were a new phenomenon, social indiscipline has become the comfortable limits of a critical message which has been non-existent for too long now, and has found, as if it never existed before, in today’s circumstances, its scapegoat: Private Enterprise.

For over more than a half century, what was this inefficiency of services, the delays in processing the most simple legal formalities; the lines; the outrageous journeys in buses; the agonizing trips of parents with their children to the few places which have always existed for children?  All of this leading to the abnormal behavior of favoritism.

What are these bunches of prefabricated buildings, without urban infrastructure which make them look like makeshift human warehouses without basic amenities? Or these beer-bars for workers? These overcrowded, dirty places, which are equal to animal pens because they only have one exit which also serves as an entrance, which flourished in the ‘70s and ‘80s, a copy of those same bars which once existed in socialist Germany, the USSR, etc.

All of this and much more has been a huge experiment on civil and social indiscipline. It creates the greatest lack of controls of our economic resources and is the most immune to administrative corruption.

This concept contrasted the functional with the pleasant; the qualitative with the quantitative, its use without caring about how ugly it might be. All of this stems from a social behavior without precedence, creating, as it were, a new, cannibalistic and uniform idiosyncrasy. Today nobody listens, everyone’s too busy shouting and arguing.

The private sector is taking shape in our country, showing us another way to act towards each other. In spite of there not being a service culture, which we have lost, it gives us signs of how efficient it can be when contrasted with state businesses where maltreatment, delays and preference in serving a foreigner when there’s only contempt in serving a fellow citizen is commonplace.