Routines and Boredom in Cuba
HAVANA TIMES – In Cuba, every day is exactly the same. Many people watch one day pass after another as if life lasted a thousand years, doing the same tasks, with a single goal: to find food for the day and stay alive.
I have a good friend who is a magnificent writer, but one who needs concentration and peace in order to write. He hasn’t written anything in years because his life has turned into a routine: getting up in the morning, going to get the rationed bread roll, brewing some coffee if he has any, and drinking it, then heading out to the street to earn a bit of money to buy that day’s food.
This person, whose name is Oscar, retired a year ago, but as everyone knows, a monthly pension of 1,500 Cuban pesos ($4 USD) isn’t even enough to get started with the prices that go up every day. He now works as a delivery man in a café, thanks to his old bicycle which he managed to fix up, get running, and now uses to get around.
The money he earns at the café is just enough to buy some root vegetables or ground chicken, which costs 270 Cuban pesos per pound in the market, since he earns 100 pesos per delivery and often only has four or fewer orders a day.
He gets home exhausted because the deliveries are quite far. With this heat and the unforgiving Cuban sun—especially this time of year—he ends up completely worn out, and also very weak. He cooks his mincemeat with sweet potato (the root vegetable he could afford) for lunch and always saves a bit for dinner.
Afterward, he lies down to rest a while—I call it a Spanish siesta. Once rested, he goes to the home of a pair of women over 80 years old who live alone because all their family left the country years ago. He cleans their yard and garden and also runs errands at the ration store for them. This afternoon he cut down a bunch of bananas for them, and they gave him some as a gift—now he has food for tomorrow.
In the afternoon, he returns to his delivery job, but more lightly—just one long trip to a regular customer who tips well and sometimes gives him a little gift, like a kilo of rice.
All of Oscar’s children and siblings have left the country. He didn’t go because he stayed behind to take care of his mother and grandparents; that’s why he now has a modest little house he inherited. At his age, he no longer has the strength to start a new life in another country.
Having family abroad—as we Cubans say—doesn’t mean they help you or send money. And no one helps this man. They are all living their lives with their own problems and expenses, because none of them are millionaires—they’re just surviving out in the wider world as migrants, which is no easy thing.
He has one brother who always sends him a food package at the end of the year, so at least once a year he can eat a piece of meat—and he is infinitely grateful for that, since his brother isn’t obligated to do it.
When he returns from his last delivery, he bathes and sits in his comfortable wicker chair to watch the world through his old cellphone, though now he can’t do that due to ETECSA’s new restrictions. He says he doesn’t have the head to read, can’t concentrate while worrying about what he’ll eat tomorrow, and at night his stomach starts growling. Usually, he eats his rationed bread in the morning, and it’s not enough to buy an extra bag of bread, which now costs 250 pesos.
So he grabs an aloe vera leaf—a wonderful plant—and eats a piece to calm his gastric juices so they don’t destroy his stomach while he sleeps—or tries to sleep—since the power was cut at eight o’clock at night, which means it won’t come back until dawn. No one knows for sure how long a blackout will last, and the mosquitoes are performing a Paganini concerto in his ears, biting him like vampires. He gets up, grabs an old metal can, throws in some dry leaves and lights them on fire; the smoke calms them down, and he can stay out on the terrace longer, where it’s cooler, until the power comes back on and he can lie down and cool off with the fan.
The next day, the same cycle of boring routine begins again.
That is the life of a man who, under different circumstances, in a different context, in another country—or even in this one but under a different system—his life could have been different. Maybe with the talent he has, he could have become a famous writer.