Of screws and being screwed

By Aurelio Pedroso

In Cuba, at any time, day or night, you feel compelled to reflect, because even the smallest detail in daily life could cause you an explosive infarct that, later in the autopsy room, might make the forensic surgeon wonder what broke your heavy heart.

One day, our eyeglass frame falls apart, so we go to an optician’s shop. On the door, we see several signs. One says, sharply and without consolation: “Out of screws.”

Since we’re trained to confront adversities, some waving of the hands and some words to the repairman solve the problem in 20 minutes, and we again see life through a pair of eyeglasses. Even more clearly, if that’s the right expression.

We continue on our way and enter a hardware store, looking for a brush. We find local and imported paints of the most varied characteristics and prices, but brushes are nowhere to be seen, either in the window display, in other stores, or in any plans to import.

We learned that, after waiting with extreme patience for the clerk to finish his task: counting screws. The man seemed to pray. “Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine…” Reaching 100, he stopped counting and looked up. “A brush,” the client asked. “There ain’t any,” the clerk answered, and continued counting blissfully: “One hundred and one, one hundred and two…”

A problem with men, screws or the system?

While in very few service-oriented establishments the “customer” is acknowledged, the truth is that in most cases proper attention is really a favor the “server” is doing to him. Whether a clerk serves you or ignores you, he’ll earn the same salary and nobody will fire him.

For months now, Granma, the newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, has been making available in its Friday issue space for readers to express their opinion, complaints or suggestions.

The topic of the privatization or cooperativization of food and other services has grown stale in Granma, and there’s still no official response, even though the topic and the controversy continue to move, as Galileo Galilei once said about the earth.

The following may seem like a tall tale, but it was narrated to me by the protagonist himself, a Spaniard. Some years ago, in a Varadero coffee shop, the “gaito” read the menu. It listed coffee and it listed milk. When the customer ordered coffee with a dash of milk, the waitresses made a face evocative of Satan being presented with a crucifix of the Nazarene.

“Sir, the menu doesn’t list “coffee with milk.” If the manager seems me serving that to you, I’ll get into trouble. Best thing is that I bring you both, and you mix them yourself.” So the Spaniard had to drink his choice from a glass, not from a cup.

The irrationality and absurdity of all this seems to be unbounded. Lovers of French surrealism would have thrilled to accounts like the following one, which I witnessed in person. At the entrance to the swimming pool of a Havana hotel, there’s a sign listing the price of admission: so much for adults, so much for minors.

A local wise guy walks up to the lifeguard and, with a straight face, tells him he wants to bring a relative to the pool. The relative is a midget, the man says. Should he pay the adult or the minor fare? “I have to check that with the manager,” the lifeguard says. A long while later, after the visitor has quaffed a couple of beers and is about to leave, the lifeguard returns with a non-answer: “Listen, comrade, I talked to the manager and he said you should go see him.”

The country is busy producing, to avoid the importation of food. That’s why brushes must be found in the Cuban-peso market and purchased several at a time, because, if you’re going to paint a single wall, one brush won’t be enough. It will shed all its bristles on the wall.

A front-page headline in Granma: “Bureaucracy hinders the production of pork in Havana.” So who are these notorious bureaucrats who hinder production? Do they do it because they’d rather promote the raising of wild hogs or pork-upines?

Granma tells us who hampers the ham: the National Institute of Water Resources, the Ministry of Public Health, the Institute for Physical Planning and the Institute of Veterinary Medicine.

The paper doesn’t say exactly how those four agencies do it. So we must assume that Water Resources complain that pigs require a lot of water for cleaning; Public Health says the little porkers stink and spread disease; Physical Planning objects to the raising of piglets in urban areas; Veterinary Medicine perhaps is asking for individual health cards so it can give each oinker the proper vaccinations.

Pig farmers in Havana City described the restrictions as “diabolical” and the nation’s First Vice President, present at one of their meetings, was forced to call off the Machiavellian obstacles and demand that the people responsible for disturbing the industry be reprimanded “immediately and adequately.”

“We laugh at our misfortunes.” That’s what the Reader’s Digest said in the 1940’s or ’50s, and that portrait of Cubans has lasted all these years. Well, it’s time to change that label and do something other than heading for the cardiologist’s office.

We may be very close to a remake of that famous 1966 film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, “The Death of a Bureaucrat.” Heck, he never died. Worse, he recovered and multiplied.

Aurelio Pedroso, a Cuban journalist, is a member of the Progreso Weekly team.