The Fate of Paper

The Fate of Paper
June 19, 2012
Veronica Vega

HAVANA TIMES — Here in Cuba, if any extenuating circumstance provides
some measure of relief against the waning of desire, the fatigue caused
by the sun or an environment that exudes abandonment, it's the
conversations one hears involuntarily.

Forced to change a few bills in CUC currency for regular pesos to avoid
being ripped off by venders at the market (who never want to pay them at
the official exchange rate of 24 pesos), I was waiting my turn in the
long line in front of the Cadeca (money exchange stand).

Very close to me, two women were ranting and raving about another one
for whom they had worked for as domestics. The apparently despotic
employer, their ex-boss, didn't deserve the least bit of sympathy.

Suddenly, a newspaper vendor who was going by on his bike caused the
chatting to stop.
"Hey, give me a Granma," shouted one of the women.

The salesman then said no by shaking his head, causing the woman to
shrug and respond sarcastically: Well, what am I going to do, they're yours.

The man, who had changed his expression, smiled and handed her a paper.
Reacting as if he had been offended, he responded: "Mine? If they were
mine, I'd burned them all up."

The woman who took the paper then looked at him threatening, "Do you
know what you're saying?"

All of this had caught the attention of several people.

The vendor held his gaze and repeated with emphasis: "Yeah. If they were
mine, I'd burned them!"

The woman, suddenly looking at him with a malicious and conspiratorial
expression, lowered her voice and said: "Don't you know how expensive
toilet paper is? What do you prefer I wipe myself with!"

The man reacted with sudden seriousness saying, "But this causes colon
cancer." He then revealed his ink-stained fingers. When I finish work,
you can't imagine the stench of kerosene I have on my hands.

At that point, people's attention began to ease up. The man went away on
his bicycle, on which stuck out the huge red italicized word "Granma."

I remembered one time a newsstand vendor was urging people to buy the
Constitution of Cuba "for the softness of its pages."

I thought about the high ecological toll and the domestic role played by
the press in Cuba for many years (ever since toilet paper started to
become a luxury here).

I also thought about recently seeing a copy of Palante (a kind of humor
magazine). Just by looking at the cover one could determine if it
deserved another alternative use.

The newspaper "withstands whatever you put on it" is a well-known maxim.
But I wonder if it's worth the sacrifice of so many trees, or the
efforts of all the lawyers who go through verbal acrobatics to deny in
one legal article what's asserted in another… or the risk of even
further scraping away the sense of words, swelling both skepticism and
iconoclasm while producing crushing generalized indifference.

And now there's the additional risk – a very serious one, if it's true
what the vender said. It can also give you colon cancer.

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