With Raul Castro, Are the Poor Poorer?

With Raul Castro, Are the Poor Poorer? / Ivan Garcia
Posted on March 2, 2015

Iván García, 26 February 2015 — José lives with his wife and five kids,
crammed into a nine by twelve foot space with a wooden platform, in a
shack in Santos Suárez, a slum south of Havana.

The tenement is a precarious spot where the electric cables hang from
the roof, water runs down the narrow central passage from the plumbing
leaks, and a disgusting smell of sewage hangs in your nose for hours.

That shack forms part of a group of ramshackle settlements where more
than 90 thousand Havanans live, according to Joel, a housing official in
the 10 de Octubre municipality.

There are worse places. On the outskirts of the capital, shantytowns are
spreading like the invasive marabou weed. There are more than 50 of
them. Houses made of sections of aluminium and cardboard, without any
sanitation, where the occupants get their electricity supply by
"informal" means.

But, going back to Santos Suárez. José says he is forty, but his sickly
pale skin and his face puffed up from excessive drink, not enough to eat
and poor quality of life make him look like an old man.

José is in that part of the population which doesn't receive remittances
and can't get convertible pesos. He works at anything. Looking after
flowerbeds, carrying debris, or ice cubes. On a good day, he makes 70
pesos, about $3. "All of it goes on food. And the rest on alcohol", he says.

His family's typical diet consists of two spoons of white rice, and a
large spoon of stew once a week, a boiled egg and a quarter chicken or
chopped beef mixed with soya which is distributed once a month via his
ration book. "I just have a coffee for breakfast. My bread from the
ration book I give to my kids."

Ten years ago, he was imprisoned for stealing light bulbs and armchairs
from houses in his area. "I stole from pure necessity. I sold the light
bulbs or daylight colour tubes for 30 pesos. The iron chairs went for 10
CUC. I once got 25 chavitos (CUC) for a wooden chair. I was able to buy
a cot for my daughter with that money", José remembers, sitting in the
doorway of a pharmacy in Serrano Street.

When you ask him about Raúl Castro's economic reforms, or what he hopes
for from the new diplomatic change of direction between Cuba and the
United States, he puts on a poker face.

"What changes? With Raúl we poor people are even poorer. Here anyone who
hasn't any connections with the system or a family in Miami is in a
difficult situation. I don't even want to talk about the old people.
There are a lot of things wrong about Fidel, but when he was in charge,
the social services and what you could get through your ration book
allowed you to live better. Not now. Every day Cubans like me get less
from the government. Many people are happy to be on better terms with
the Americans, but what can Obama do? He isn't the president of Cuba,"
he points out, while he takes a long swig of the worst possible alcohol
out of a plastic bottle.

The streets of Havana swarm with hundreds of people like José asking for
change, pulling out scraps from rubbish bins, or sleeping on cardboard
boxes in uninhabitable buildings.

In the entrance of a building in Carmen Street, on the corner of 10th of
October, about 10 people are there selling second-hand books, old shoes
and junk. Nelson, a gay man about 60 years old, suffers from chronic
diabetes. He sells old magazines. As far as he is concerned, the
revolution can be summed up in a word: "shit".

"It's all just speeches. They said it was a revolution of humble people
and for humble people, but it was a lie. Poor people were always badly
off, but now we are more fucked than ever. What Raúl has brought us has
been capitalism, of the worst kind. Fidel didn't tolerate many things,
including the homosexuals, but we lived a little better. The poor will
always be poor, in a dictatorship or in a democracy", asserts Nelson.

Like in the film Goodbye Lenin, directed by Wolfgang Becker, where the
East Germans feel nostalgic about the Communist era, in Cuba, those
whose lives are stuck in a tale of poverty, feel longing for the decade
from 1970 to 1980, when the state gave you every nine days a pound of
beef per person, through your ration book, a can of condensed milk cost
20 centavos and the shelves in the stores were full of Russian jams.

For Havanans like Nelson and José, you can't eat democracy.

Photo: The conditions Yumila Lora Castillo, who is 8 years old and has a
malignant tumor, is living in. Marelis Castillo, her mother, told Jorge
Bello Domínguez, from the Cuban Community Communicators Network (who
took the photo), that they haven't even authorised the diet of meat and
milk that people with cancer in Cuba are entitled to. A mother of two
other children, Marelis lives in this inhuman situation in El Gabriel,
in the municipality of Güira de Melena, Artemisa province, some 85
kilometers southwest of Havana.

Translated by GH

Source: With Raul Castro, Are the Poor Poorer? / Ivan Garcia |
Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/with-ral-castro-are-the-poor-poorer-ivan-garcia/