Those in power in Cuba, in order to maintain their prerogatives, insist on the irrevocability of the system.
By Reinaldo Escobar (14ymedio)
HAVANA TIMES – The chaotic accumulation of garbage in Havana is explained by the official propaganda media as the result of a combination of factors that include social indiscipline and the effects of the United States blockade*. Those who exercise a discordant criterion reduce the cause of this disaster to the inability of the Government to fulfill a task which it is obliged to do.
If those in power in Cuba were to acknowledge their inability to resolve the problem, they might be forced to resign from their posts so that more capable people could take over.
Since they are not willing to give up everything they enjoy in order to stay in power and since they lack the ability to keep the country’s cities clean, they then appeal to that revolutionary principle, which has become a working method and is expressed in a willful idea left as an inheritance from Fidel Castro: “We are going to do it at whatever price is necessary.”
As can be seen in the image accompanying this text, the trash has been collected and a disciplined citizen is preparing to leave his bag in some empty containers.
As there were no suitable vehicles to handle the containers (because of the blockade) and as the rubbish was overflowing into the street (because of the undisciplined), dump trucks and different types of excavators were called in, which, with their voracious buckets, designed for rougher work, collected the waste and deposited it in the trucks. A simple job with immediate results.
The price to pay was the demolition of the curb protecting the flowerbed and the sidewalk on Estancia Street, next to the parking lot of the Ministry of Agriculture. The destruction was not caused in one go, but rather by virtue of the repeated occasions in which this method was applied, gradually producing the current deterioration.
That is the banal fact, but what underlies it is the will to face a difficulty at whatever price is necessary. To resist as long as possible in order not to give up.
Obviously, the application of this legacy of Fidelism extends to almost all spheres. In order not to give up, it was decided to use national oil to fuel the thermoelectric plants, with the consequent damage to the boilers that have not been able to resist the corrosive effect of the sulfur.
In order not to give in to the stampede of qualified personnel in schools, it was decided to train ’emerging teachers’ in a hurry, with the consequence of a drop in the quality of academic results.
In order not to give in to the enemy in the area of Healthcare, surgeons learn to suture with threads other than those recommended and the shortage of medicines is being addressed with homeopathy.
It would be overwhelming to go on with the examples that could be brought to light. In the construction of low-cost housing, in agriculture with the absence of fertilizers, herbicides, machinery or irrigation, in industry that subjects its production plans to the schedule of blackouts, in science subject to impaired internet connectivity, even in the defense of the country, where the proclaimed military invulnerability is undermined because pilots cannot train, radars are not turned on to save fuel and it is almost offensive to the suffering civilian population to spend resources on maneuvers.
Hopefully we won’t have to pay the price that seems necessary.
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*Translator’s note: There is, in fact, no US ‘blockade’ on Cuba, but this continues to be the term the Cuban government prefers to apply to the ongoing US embargo. During the Cuban Missile Crisis the US ordered a Naval blockade (which it called a ‘quarantine’) on Cuba in 1962, between 22 October and 20 November of that year. The blockade was lifted when Russia agreed to remove its nuclear missiles from the Island. The embargo had been imposed earlier in February of the same year, and although modified from time to time, it is still in force, with some humanitarian exceptions.
Translated by Translating Cuba.
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