Geriatric Future

By Pedro Pablo Morejon

HAVANA TIMES – Down the street from where my partner lives, in the same garbage dumpster where the dead baby showed up, an old man devours some rotten tomatoes he seems to have picked out of there. It’s something she saw on Sunday, but it’s similar to the image I see every morning: elderly men and others not so elderly, dirty and poorly dressed, rummaging through the garbage.

It’s the burden of poverty that most Cubans are suffering and is hitting the most vulnerable especially hard. Those who worked their entire lives and are now scraping by on a measly pension; those who don’t even receive this pension; those with nobody abroad to help alleviate their needs; those who are sick and alone, and those who aren’t alone but their families can’t help them anymore…

This is why it’s not strange to find people asking for money any day, at any time, rummaging around in the garbage, or selling trinkets just to get by. It has nothing to do with the postcard images the regime and its accomplices are selling to the world of a Cuba with beaches, beautiful women, tobacco, rum, parties, dancing, and happiness, but few believe them anymore.

This past weekend, I was walking down the street when a man stood in my way. I was in a rush and I felt offended, a feeling that passed from annoyance to resignation. Gibberish began and I soon understood that he wanted to ask me for money. I automatically pulled out my wallet and handed him a miserable 20-peso bill.

It’s not that it’s very generous, but 20 pesos isn’t anything today and I needed to get off, like I said, I was in a rush. I don’t know if he’d asked for money for food or another vice. Many of them are alcoholics because their lives are in ruins, and they can only find solace in alcohol.

I remembered how much I’d changed. As a child, the sight of a beggar used to hurt me and I didn’t understand how people could carry on walking by, indifferent. Today, I walk on indifferently, like the majority, because reality surpasses my possibilities. I can’t give money to every person in need I come across, my meagre means aren’t enough to be a philanthropist.

When I give anything, it’s from the little I have, not from the money I have left over as a millionaire, who invests part of their fortune to fight, let’s say cancer, which I think is great, of course.

Luckily, I look at these elderly people and I almost never see my future reflected in them. I imagine being a decent and respectable man and of course, vigorous, that can even spark the interest of a nice-looking fifty-year-old.

But not all the time, sometimes I think that despite my healthy and optimistic lifestyle, I might end up like one of them in 25 or 30 years, and then I get terrified and shift my mental and emotional resources to go back to my inner peace.

The thing is that amidst this mass emigration driven by poverty, if this horrible social order doesn’t change, it won’t be long before Cuba becomes one big miserable walking residential home, where some people will be looked after by their own who have left, and others will have to languish between filth and poverty.

Read more from the diary of Pedro Pablo Morejon here.