You Won’t Believe It!

By Eduardo N. Cordoví Hernandez

HAVANA TIMES – Today I woke up feeling very pensive. Actually, I think I wake up more like this every day. After making some plans about my activities for the day, checking my WhatsApp, my email, my Messenger, and the main news on Google, it was around nine-thirty a.m.

I grabbed my ration book and went to get the daily bread roll. On the way, I saw many people at the pharmacy, a sign that the monthly medicines had been restocked. When I arrived at the place that supplies the bread and showed my document, I got the response that the bread was already gone. But if the bakers work all night making bread, how could it be gone by twenty to ten? So, I asked did they not make the full amount, or is there an electrical issue in the production area…?  No, we don’t have information about the reasons… What time do you think…? I don’t know, come back in the afternoon.

I decided to return to the pharmacy and see which medicines were restocked. I have a prescription for Enalapril for high blood pressure and have a card called the Tarjetón that records monthly deliveries and matches a matrix held by the pharmacy employees. In normal times, if there was any transportation problem, factory supply issue, or delay in receiving the medicine from abroad, of course, for reasons beyond the consumer’s control, the following month or the next shipment within the current month, the patient wouldn’t lose their medication, and the Tarjetón was a means of control, defense, and demand.

But that was in normal times. Such procedures are now part of the past, something like history, which is no longer the case, and now it works differently. Before, medicines “came” once a week, on a fixed day. Now, we don’t even know when they will arrive. They come when available and not enough for everyone with a Tarjetón. You have to get in line, and after three hours, you might not get your medicine.

The only way to keep your blood pressure under control, if that’s your case, is to buy it on the informal market, not in the pharmacy, from resellers, in the black market, which are various names for identifying the new, more reliable source for your survival, if you have the money to pay the cost. And if you don’t? Well, if you ask that, it’s a sign that you have very little imagination.

This is more or less the same procedure for all medicines for degenerative, chronic diseases, called “old people’s” diseases, but also for other illnesses. I mean the so-called acute, transmissible, or infectious diseases, or whatever they are called. In short, for all medicines and health-related products.

Not to mention thermometers, syringes, first aid supplies, condoms, aspirin, enemas, bedpans, adhesive tapes, band-aids, etc.

I haven’t conducted a public survey, but I dare to say that no one under twenty-five years old – except for condoms – knows that such “things” were once sold in pharmacies.

Maybe not in this order, but for these reasons, in April I had to work on the day of the medicine sale, and I found out afterward; in May, I missed it; in June, they didn’t bring any, so I’m more resolved to buy them at high prices, which seems more profitable than paying that quota of stress chasing a product that seems more ingenious than intelligent to avoid being caught.

As I didn’t see Enalapril on the lists displayed in the window to avoid answering all users about the products that came or not, I went to the bank to see if I could get some cash. To make matters worse, there are three ATMs, but only two were working. I got in line outside to withdraw at the counter instead. After an hour in line, the money in the ATMs ran out. Another hour later, they said that the counter would only give up to two thousand pesos (around $6 USD) to meet the high demand and reduce chaos. Another hour, and I got in the bank; the air conditioning was off, only one window working as a counter, and, can you believe,… the person ahead of me was making a deposit of about fifty thousand pesos in ten and twenty peso bills!

Another hour to leave, without even having withdrawn the full amount I needed… One says it, and no one believes it: a little past two in the afternoon, spending an entire morning four blocks from my house, to only withdraw a little more than half of my salary… and then, at that hour, figuring out what to do for lunch.

But, if it’s about not being believed, let me tell you: My friend Carol is a US citizen, born and educated in the United States, like her mother’s entire family, but she lives in France because her father is French. It turns out that Carol loves Cuba, she often comes several times a year. She is currently in Paris. This week she told me that she went to the Cuban embassy for some formalities to return here, and she said: “You won’t believe it.”

What did she say? That it seemed like she was in Cuba: it was hot, there was a delay in attending to her, there was no paper, the printer was broken…

Read more from the diary of Eduardo N. Cordovi here.