Cubans have food – resourcefulness, too

By Aurelio Pedroso

A laptop falls from a fifth floor and its owner puts it together again, this time rebuilt with cardboard, a caricature of real wood. Esthetics aside, the laptop is back in operation, whereas in any other country in the world it would have landed in a garbage dump.

The same man served the buffet at his daughter’s 15th-birthday party using the lids that usually cover electrical-meter boxes. It took him almost a year of patiently collecting and disinfecting the plastic containers to accommodate in each a pair of mini-croquettes, the classic and irreplaceable cold salad and a slice of cake.

I apologize to those born in other lands if I sound like a chauvinist, which I’m not, but the resourcefulness of the Cuban people has no limits. For this reason, and others that are irrelevant, in many parts of the world Cubans have made their way and succeeded.

Whoever wants to politicize the matter is entitled to. In my opinion, this “asset” has nothing to do with the past 50 years, but circumstances have redoubled that gift down to the most minor episode of subsistence or effort to achieve something in life.

Today we live truly difficult, if not distressing times. Even so, a crack lets us see new horizons. More than half a million working-age people out on the street and another million waiting for the same fate serve as the red alert that calls for a swift solution.

A solution with two hopefully harmonious and complementary tracks: the state’s, which tries to prevent a disorder that could soon become total, generalized chaos, and the personal, the family track, which has priority, for reasons of survival.

The much-discussed food problem could well be solved if a green light is given to less control by the state and more autonomy to food producers.

I have never trusted numbers and ciphers. Live to see, as the saint said. If you drive around the capital city, you will see land cultivated by individuals or cooperatives, left and right.

In the populous municipality of Arroyo Naranjo, I found a black man sitting at a street crossing, with two baskets with tomatoes nearby. “Five pesos a pound,” he told me. I asked how he weighed the produce and he pulled out from his pocket a portable scale, a handmade contraption but effective and accurate.

And the police? “Sometimes even they buy from me,” he replied.

If somewhere in the city, law enforcement officers contribute to the disorder by preventing an elderly person from selling a tube of toothpaste or “crazy glue,” I have not seen that done, and it seems that the police practice of unreasonably harassing the elderly has been removed from their daily tasks.

Farther away from downtown Havana, in, say, Punta Brava, a region that also belongs to the city, you see some well-organized and productive poultry farms, except that the producers lament the lack of feed, fencing, cages and other accessories necessary to run these small private enterprises.

I spoke with an expert veterinarian (who is also an entrepreneur) who assured me that all these mini-farms could checkmate the state monopoly responsible for producing eggs. A carton containing 30 eggs is sold for between 50 and 60 Cuban pesos, or about three dollars. This is because, when it comes to the bottom line, the private farms are more efficient than the state-run farms.

The great fear of some in the island, and the distorted premonitions that some make, is that as soon as the private farms make profits, they will again be taken to the guillotine.

And that’s because there are plenty of characters in the highest echelons of government who, when addressing the issue, warn that the process of private initiative “is designed so that nobody can get rich.”

That’s an odd turn of a phrase, because you don’t have to be an economic scholar to understand that the more production and efficiency, the more wealth. And if the country begins to create wealthy people, welcome to them, and may they pay their taxes as God intended.

So here I leave you, respected readers. Outside our office in Havana, someone is hawking guava and cheese pastries for a peso each, an example of why this is an irreversible process, plain and simple.

Otherwise, let’s go to the back of the line to leap into the precipice, which is indeed quite deep.