Tropical Fish and Other Options
By Eduardo N. Cordoví Hernández
HAVANA TIMES – I have always heard that it’s good for many reasons to have an aquarium with tropical fish. It can be an honorable hobby, a pastime with an artistic touch, which requires attention, dedication, and knowledge. It’s like having a job for which you don’t receive a salary, but perhaps, if you become passionate about it, you could earn some money. Although that may not be the initial goal.
It involves a certain ritual of activities that make you think about other things, we could say more grounded or more real, than those you usually think about or worry or suffer over daily, or when you have nothing to think about. It’s something that can give life a sense of meaning, a reason to keep living and to regain what the French call “joie de vivre.”
But at the same time, it becomes a daily activity that helps develop a sense of responsibility; it can turn into a discipline… though it can also become part of boredom. This is what many people call a hobby.
A hobby is not exactly a pastime like playing dominoes or canasta in the afternoons. Firstly, because a hobby is practiced alone, although it’s not like playing solitaire. No. It unfolds a range of activities that end up making you peaceful, stable, and diligent.
Perhaps that’s why Tolkien created hobbits as one of the “races” of imaginary beings to bring his character Bilbo Baggins to life, the protagonist of The Hobbit, who later appears in The Lord of the Rings. Bilbo Baggins is a calm, methodical, pleasant, orderly, traditional character… A true “hobby” with furry little feet.
The point is that having an aquarium with tropical fish gives you something to do, something to take care of, and then you sit and watch them, calming yourself, enjoying the colors and movements of these little aquatic creatures like a hypnotic therapy that soothes stress or relieves anxiety without pills or syrups. Something that, in this time of such severe medication shortages in Cuba, especially those we call tranquilizers or “for nerves”, could be an optimal substitute, as even linden and chamomile are hard to find in gardens these days.
But what could have been a solution falls into the black hole of Cuba’s misfortune. What grandiosity! The fact is that, until a few years ago, the tropical fish trade was a business that yielded decent profits.
Suppliers, who were usually breeders, began to face difficulties with transportation due to fuel shortages, lack of lubricants, and spare parts. Not to mention the fish themselves, most of them rare and delicate species that require personalized care. For their safety and ease of commerce, they need large, compartmentalized tanks since some species cannot live together as they are predators of others.
This highlights the need for large patios for the tanks. Then there’s the quality of the water, the risk of becoming mosquito breeding grounds, which requires safety measures to avoid such problems, plus the harassment of inspectors “of all kinds,” trying, as we say, “to bring the sardines to their frying pan.”
On the other hand, “tropical fish” went out of fashion because, although some like the goldfish grow quite large, the idea of making a soup or frying one isn’t appealing, even though they’re beautiful, I mean nice to look at. I clarify this to avoid confusion with “bonitos” (a different kind of fish), which are indeed bigger fish, and although they are also quite handsome, anyone would want to eat one.
Nowadays, the trend is towards boniato (sweet potato), I repeat—not bonito! Bonito comes in cans and is very expensive. And the fresh one is “even more expensive.”
So, going back to tropical fish and alternatives for improving nervousness and anxiety, we have other therapies available, not to be confused with tilapias, which are also a type of tropical fish that can live in freshwater. They were once popular, at least in Havana, years ago, as they were even farmed in state-run hatcheries, but like so many other things, they have disappeared from the market.
There’s also a lot of consumption of claria, a type of scavenger fish, related to catfish, caught by those fishing from bridges over the few rivers and streams in the capital, but it doesn’t stand out commercially in what are called illicit sales.
The options, then, are relaxation exercises and breathing, yoga, not arguing, thinking positively, and as a psychiatrist once told a friend of mine: “just let it roll off your back,” which doesn’t mean carry it all, but rather leave it behind and forget about it. None of this sounds very scientific, but as El Suave, an old and wise peasant I was fortunate to meet in the mid-1970s used to say: “when there’s no bread, you eat cassava.”