All I ask for is transparency and seriousness (+Español)
The partial dollarization of the economy in Cuba seems, I insist, to further encourage rapid learning of the English language, which is already necessary even to start a computer, find out a little more about what is happening in the world and how Donald Trump’s new geophragmatic process of turning Canadian poutine into McDonald’s.
Consequently, in the capital’s Buenavista neighborhood there is someone dedicated to teaching English: he or she informs us, in an advertisement, that one can learn the new language in three months. At any moment they will tell us that one can master English in 24 hours, and without a need to go to the bathroom.
And thank goodness that, in the absence of fractional currency, its promoters have chosen to hand out candy and not gum to promote that not so American, but Mayan, custom of chewing gum until just before dying in an intensive care unit.
But jokes aside, which the situation does not warrant, the government’s decision to set up commercial establishments where food and other products are bought, and are billed in US dollars — and not in Freely Convertible Currency (MLC), which at one time were dollars or euros — has been widely discussed and criticized.
This had already begun with the sale of fuel with the card called Clásica. Honestly, it did not cause much of a fuss. People, that is, drivers did not cause much fuss. And let it be clear that filling a metal tank with gasoline is not the same as putting food in a stomach.
In short, because I don’t like the long stories and those recurring violin solos that drive you dizzy, I don’t care if tomorrow they decide to open a tent where payment is made exclusively in Burkina Faso currency as long as there is transparency and seriousness towards clients, and they don’t adhere to what Mark Twain once remarked: That “a banker is a man who gives us an umbrella when it’s sunny and takes it away when it starts to rain.”
