What Will Happen to Us?
HAVANA TIMES — I’ve read several diary posts by HT colleagues and I marvel at how many topics one can write about, and I confess that I’ve run out of ideas — depression visits me daily. The rhythm of life seems to have extinguished my desire to do writing work; I even have a book of poems that I haven’t touched and that is still unfinished.
The tests we face are very harsh. The triviality of domestic life ties us down like a heavy chain: going out to buy food, keeping watch in case the electricity is cut off and the washing machine is left halfway through with clothes inside, or the electric cooker with the beans still raw. And now there’s the issue of transportation, because with the shortage of gasoline and oil at service stations collective, taxi prices rise. Public transportation, meanwhile, has been suspended.
What will people do to get to their jobs, to the university, to a hospital? Those who don’t have money to take a taxi will have to walk — or they won’t go anywhere at all.
On top of that there’s the instability of the electric supply, sometimes for more than 14 hours straight. I’ve had to cook, run the water pump, and do laundry in the middle of the night. Sleep and rest are interrupted by these disruptions. Health gradually deteriorates.
It seems contradictory, because I was just telling a friend that I’m worried since suddenly we had three days in certain parts of Havana when the electricity wasn’t cut. What is happening — is there some secret fuel reserve? What explains this miracle?
People deserve a calmer life — to experience a different reality, a country that is clean, healthy both physically and morally, with citizens’ rights, where there isn’t this sadness and worry about young people, about the lack of opportunities, so that they won’t emigrate and abandon us. We need the force of their drive in order to develop. What is obsolete should fade away naturally.
The leaders ask us for resistance, and we have been resisting since we were born — enduring chronic hunger, abandonment, and confinement. We’ve stopped seeing friends and loved ones who accompanied us through life. Over the decades we’ve known only losses. What more is left for us, what other terrible things are still to come?
Read more from the diary of Irina Pino aquí en Havana Times.