Surrounded by salty sea water, and yet we import the salt
HAVANA – Every time that President Díaz-Canel talks about that Cuban national pastime, the importation of everything, even a regular Joe like myself feels scolded, which reminds me of the famous snowplow story.
I grew up listening to that story, it was back in the 1970s. It is the far-fetched tale of a trade official who at the beginning of the Revolution happened to buy a large quantity of second-hand Bulgarian snowplows (obviously, at a very good price!). It’s probably a myth, although deep down there’s a certain truth to the story: all you have to do is enter any Havana store to discover a large number of things for sale that have no rhyme or reason, or that don’t work — and both in a literal and figurative sense.
Ornaments that do not adorn, clothing that nobody in their right mind would ever dare wear, furniture made of fake wood that falls apart from wear on the display windows, obsolete appliances, products whose only goal appears to be reaching, calmly and peacefully, sooner rather than later, their expiration dates.
As if this was not bad enough, even worse is the price of these useless things — as if to guarantee that no one, no matter how stupid, or clumsy or rich, will think twice about purchasing them. Even worse is that they’re sometimes brought from a remote corner of the world, at the cost of an arm and a leg, and they could probably have been made better and cheaper just around the corner at Pepe’s Buy and Sell Store.
In the midst of it all we have the corruption, something we can’t pretend to not be aware of. A commission here and a few hundred there, these persons move mountains.
I recently blew my stack when I discovered in the shelves of a supermarket in Centro Habana a bunch of NaCl packages — simple and elementary sodium chloride. In other words, common salt, table salt, but for some reason imported from dear old Mexico.
The person who decided on importing, with the people’s money, salt for our tables (aside from the chicken and rice), demonstrates the heights of inefficiency or self-confidence, or both.
Cuba, that as far as I know is surrounded by the sea, has an estimated potential of 78 million metric tons of salt per cubic kilometer of seawater on its coasts. And for whatever the reason, one thing is that you can’t fish out of so much water, but that you can’t extract your own salt from that water and instead have to purchase it from Mexico, China or wherever they buy it from, that’s another story.
That bad habit of importing almost everything did not come out of thin air, or by spontaneous generation. I didn’t invent the idea, nor did it start yesterday. It is a system that did not impose itself, and it is not cured from one day to the other, or by simply talking about it. Many things must change, really change, and for the better, so that in this country a different productive and consumption matrix prevails. Doing so is urgent because, as things stand, everything else depends on it.
