The Stove Top Expresso Maker that is Cuba
HAVANA TIMES – Actor Carlos Massola “exploded”. Aside from food shortages, the harsh and real starvation of a nation, he wanted “to get to the heart” of the matter: “It’s the system’s abuse of prisoners of conscience and their families.” “Cuba is screwed and needs help.” “It’s very sad. We have to help so this absolutely awful situation can end once and for all.”
The popular actor of so many Cuban soaps made himself clear in an interview with Cubanet: “I’m telling the truth here to people’s faces. Without fear. (…) I know what’s on the line, but I’m not at all afraid.” He stressed his desire to leave the island: “There’s nothing left for me to do here.” He ended the conversation suddenly with the slogan: “Down with the dictatorship. Down with Communism.”
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Photographer Gabriel Guerra Bianchini “exploded”: “What happened on July 11th was a before and after I believe. I would like to be in Cuba, with my workshop (…), and go out to my Malecon in the evening (…) my late afternoon ritual almost every day. The thing is, it’s unjust and inhumane just how bad things have got. There is no bright mind or kind heart that can attempt to justify what is happening here. There just isn’t.”
From his newly opened studio in Madrid, the graphic artist told Diario de Cuba: “There’s a point when everything becomes crystal clear. (…) Who wants to live their life justifying what inspires you and what this artwork says word for word? Who can live amid a war? Someone once told me that we’ve spent so much time living in a boxing match unfortunately, that we even defend ourselves from kisses. That’s not the life I want. I don’t want to carry on living in a place where I defend myself from kisses.”
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Volleyball player Regla Torres “exploded”: I’ve seen how women’s volleyball has been dying for a long time from within. Mistakes, bad decisions, whims, pride, mediocrity, incompetence, a lack of dedication, the lack of discipline that ends up in bad results, lies, experts that destroyed Cuba’s Volleyball Academy, I’VE HAD IT FOR A LONG TIME, and you see the heaps of shit flying around, with a broken soul, watching how people who had nothing to do with our history, which is great, greater than us, destroy it, tread all over its greatness, without mercy.”
The three-time Olympic champion who was selected the best player of the 20th century by the Federation Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) warned: “I have a lot more to say, but that’s enough for now. I’m on a horse with an axe in my hand, not a machete. I’M REALLY PISSED OFF AND ASHAMED, and if anyone dares to call me out, they better have a good reason to convince me otherwise. The second time I talk about this, I won’t spare anyone.”
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More and more ordinary Cubans, without titles, are “exploding”, such as veteran from Guantanamera Josefa Le .vg/on Pozo, who is living in a home that is more rubble than a house, with her sick 84-year-old mother, and she’s tired of waiting for a solution from the State who says they won’t leave anyone helpless.
“I’ve made complaints there [in] Havana, and Havana ordered our local authorities to resolve the situation; but nothing’s been done up until now. I’ve been fighting for this house to get fixed since 2014 and nothing, nothing, I haven’t even been able to get a bag of cement or sheet of zinc roofing.”
“I’ve gone to the provincial and municipal Governments a few times and the answer is the same: there isn’t any, there isn’t any, there isn’t any; this is what they tell me, just that. (…) I don’t know what I’m going to do. We’re here waiting, waiting, and waiting, but things are still dreadful,” said the pained woman.
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Interviewed by Escambray newspaper, Ricardo Perez Perez, director of the Coffee Roasting Plant in Cabaiguan (Sancti Spiritus) said that the province “is going through a good time”, because coffee was distributed in the rations for October (a 115g packet per person over the age of 7) and added: “we’re going to enjoy coffee in November and December.”
In unlabeled plastic packets, that is to say, transparent plastic without identification or a label, Sancti Spiritus locals will be able to receive “Hola” coffee, that is “coming with its excellent quality” and is still “50% split chickpeas and 50% coffee,” the director said, also mentioning he was leading a “courageous” group of workers.
However, amidst so many pearls, the real gem of the interview came when the director talked about certain tests, surely unique in the world: “We have Cuban stove top expresso makers in the lab. (…) We run different explosion tests on each batch of coffee” “and there isn’t any danger.”
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But he left out one small detail. There isn’t a problem with “Hola” coffee, it is the problem, the notorious concoction that could be called coffee as much as it can be called chickpeas, because it is half-half –when producers aren’t stealing part of the coffee.
“Hola” not only comes poorly roasted, poorly packaged, late and with long lines, but it caused the expresso makers to explode and mutilates people, almost always women, almost always poor women, who are already suffering the burden of so many problems. They and also have to risk their lives to put a murky and bitter thing on the stove when fuel or electricity lets them, so the family can drink coffee.
What the Government calls “coffee” seems to me to be a pretty exact metaphor of absolute Cuban ruin; or the opposite, the socio-political disaster that “coffee” encapsulates so well. But the explosion tests carried out by the Communist Party, perhaps with incompetent lab workers from the Central Committee or militant intellectuals, aren’t trustworthy anymore. They say the country “won’t explode”, but the many explosions – still isolated and kept in check (via repression) – refute the diagnosis, they’re on the rise.
Perhaps the time when the national coffee makers refuse to strain garbage in the name of socialism is on the horizon, and it will definitely explode. We’ve got to live to see it happen.
As an African American, I can remember influential American writers, poets, musicians,
actors, athletes and essayists of the 1950s and 1960s speaking out on the plight of the “negro” at that time. Eventually, their words began to sink in to the consciousness of society as a whole and public policy began to change. When will Cuban society as a whole begin to feel any pressure to change?