The Beginning of My New Year in Cuba

Nonardo Perea

HAVANA TIMES — I was hoping something would change this year, but nothing has. Instead, as Julio Iglesias’ song goes, “life is still the same” and we continue to hear the same, boring rhetoric everywhere.

Some acquaintances and even strangers I run into at bus stops or the endless line-ups people stand in to buy eggs hold trivial conversations and are certain that, by mid-2016, things will begin to be different, that President Obama has something planned for his visit.

What’s certain is that the crisis we face is becoming deeper and more harmful. One can see this in the faces of people on the street at any time of day, looking for food, complaining about high product prices or fearlessly declaring that the situation is so bad it’s become frightening.

Most of my friends long to leave for any destination around the world, having absolutely no confidence that these alleged changes are coming.

I’m also afraid of staying and feel the growing impulse to do anything to get out this year, to leave for Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile or Haiti, I don’t care, so as not to wait for things to change in 2017 and so on. To see another year go by and to grow older, year after year, thinking changes that will never come are around the corner, wasting time, dreaming all the time, is to have no future or, at least, no promising future.

My year has started with privations of every sort, and these not only affect me but the majority of the Cuban people. The positive side to this is that many still believe that, at some point in their lives, things can take a turn for the better. I continue to believe that those changes are nothing but a pipe-dream. Could I be wrong?