Letter to a Cuban Abroad

Maria Matienzo

Dear Tatiana:

I’m writing to let you know that here everyone is breathing, sleeping, eating and panicking over the “readjustment of Cuba’s economic model.”  It’s impossible to think about anything else other than how we’re going to put food on the table this coming year.

So, I’ll make a superhuman effort to tell you about anything that doesn’t have to do with unemployment or layoffs (oh, excuse me; currently they’re calling this the “availability” of workers).

Now I’ll take a deep breath and concentrate on another detail that we’re adapting to (and you know that there are lots of them). Since you left us, we’ve taken only a few steps beyond primitive communalism (with our chief elder included) and we’ve now arrived at a feudal system, one which will now become more accentuated by the trades.

Now, you see; I’ve returned back to the same thing.  Well, I’ll try to re-focus myself again.

Do you know that a few days ago it came out in the Granma newspaper that by next July they’re expecting to have a fiber optic cable installed that will connect Cuba to the Internet?  I can’t believe it.  We’re going to have Internet!

Perhaps we’ll be able to communicate more often, because look at how much work it has taken to maintain this friendship (with us always having to communicate through a third person, me writing on a borrowed e-mail account, relying on acquaintances who come and go…).

Imagine; it’s been five years since you left and I’ve not been able to see your face since then.  I only know about the changes in you and your life from what you’ve told me.

They say that with the Internet, people can see each other in real time as well as talk to each other, send photos, make new friends, and buy and sell things.  Wow!  That would be great!  I wonder if it’s true.

But here they also say that it will be easier for the enemy influence to get onto the island and into our homes.  There could be, for example, a wave of pornography, and that would also be bad for us.

It’s probably better that I don’t get too many illusions because this cable system —since it has to pass through Jamaica and Venezuela— will bring a special type of Internet: some a kind of Bolivarian and Jamaican Internet. You know that anything is possible here.

In any case, they’re already determined the cost, and they’re going to have to take it out of our hides.  How?  I don’t I know – but know how to do it.

I don’t want to get my hopes up, but I’m sure it will improve people’s existing connections, though that won’t mean anything to the 90 percent of the population who don’t even know what it is.

By the way, so far I haven’t found myself on the street with no job.  But they say (at least this is what someone told me in the hallway) the situation is not the way it’s been reported on the news, and that the layoffs are unconstitutional.  This means that they’re illegal since they were not approved by any law saying that they can fire people in Cuba just like that.

You see? There I go again, talking about the same thing.

Let me let you go so that I don’t negatively complicate your life.

Kisses to you and your family. Tell Felito to take care of himself and to not go crazy seeing that things here are getting worse every day.

Love you all.