Our Current Cuban Reality

By Jose Rodriguez*

HAVANA TIMES — It’s very difficult to live in my country without being troubled by the problems that we Cubans experience with public transport, extremely low salaries and super expensive basic goods when compared to our low salaries.

However, what bothers me most is our passivity, that feeling of indifference which Cubans feel with regard to all of our leaders who live in luxury and don’t care too much about are problems. This is a photo of a building that is almost in ruins where a tree has grown inside while it slowly collapses, day after day.

Nobody cares about this, the upper class continues to live with a lot of material comforts and it’s like they’re laughing in the face of the masses and their misery. They used to say that the Revolution took place for the poor, so that we could all be equals and the rest of the spiel. Today, they no longer even bother to defend these principles, they only defend this with silence and by misinforming the Cuban people.

How much longer will we have to live with such bureaucratic and bourgeois incompetence, these people who only think about themselves, about clapping hard and raising their right hands so as to approve laws that will only drag us down further and further?

In Cuba, the judgement of Solomon prevails where the government pretends to pay us a salary and the population pretends as if it works as we gradually follow a path to an abyss, to disappointment, to silent unhappiness and to find an alternative ending, which we’ll never have here, in other lands.

They know this but they don’t care, it’s as if they’re forcing us to live with their corrupt and inefficient economic policy because it’s the only way that they will be able to remain in power, otherwise they’d lose it and this is what’s most important to them, their personal wellbeing, not the misery that the vast majority of the population lives in.

When will Cuba stop following this policy which has extensively proven to everyone that it is just a great failure? They try to cover it up but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how much they dress up their economic policy, it doesn’t work because of our leaders’ inefficiency, people who may be trusted politically speaking but are totally incompetent as professionals in every sector.

They can deceive the Venezuelans, the Bolivians, the entire international Left but they’ll never be able to deceive us Cubans who suffer and have suffered their inefficient economic policy day after day for decades, protected by the famous US economic blockade.

Cubans know full well that the greatest blockade that exists on the island is that in the minds of those who lead us, those who are the real culprits of the economic disaster that Cuba has been experiencing for years now. It was only during the time of the USSR that we lived a relatively happy period economically-speaking, however, that was just because they gave us everything we needed to live and more, we got used to living without having to work.

Fidel and his incompetence are to blame for trying to invent the impossible and for experimenting on us as if we were real lab rats and now that he’s withdrawn into his senile state, he’s left us in the most humiliating crisis in every respect, especially in our moral values where we have to steal in order to survive.

Why is it taking us so long to have internet at home? So that the Cuban people can’t open their eyes and discover all of the lies they’ve lived through. For the government, it’s important to control all of our information; an uninformed people are an oppressed people who can be easily manipulated.

*A Havana Times guest writer