Wait till next year

By Aurelio Pedroso

HAVANA – As children, waiting for Christmas, the Three Kings, and the New Year seemed to us like an eternity. Later, when we left behind that age, full of dreams and fantasies, and became teenagers wielding machetes with blistered hands in sugar plantations everywhere, every day seemed like a century.

That’s how we grew up. Of late, the passage of years has become like drinking water. As a Spanish saying said, “Time is a child playing dice.”

During this season (and I don’t know why) Havana’s shopping malls have enriched the variety of Christmas gifts with a variety of goods ample enough to satisfy the most demanding of buyers.

It’s as if the authorities – which do the shopping outside the island – are making sure that on January 1 the Cuban people will wake up smiling happily, ready to begin another stage like the previous ones, with the same amount of sacrifice, limitations and hopes.

“With a fighting spirit,” as some say.

I have not yet met neighbors, friends or cheery strangers on the street who parrot the wish “A happy and prosperous New Year.” Unless I’m mistaken, that standard phrase will be heard beginning in mid-December.

You don’t have to wait for next year or the forecast of the santeros’ snail shells or an announcement from the government on December 31 to realize that 2013 will be just as difficult as 2012. It will also be a strategic period in the so-called actualization of Cuban socialism, what I call the now-or-never moment in the prosperity of a republic that is now betting on a model different from the one we practiced for half a century, a model that did not produce the expected fruit, whatever the reasons.

Cuba in 2013 will be facing huge challenges. Its main enemy is not so much the Empire (i.e., the United States) but time and that mindset of ours that needs to understand that the country must follow a new path in all the indices – measurable or not – of modern society, from one day to the next.

In the new year, the problems to be solved will not be very different from this year’s. Some are getting tiresome, while others are improving. In no order of importance, we have the problems of food, housing, transportation, and wages as an incentive. Health and education require economic support, same as pensions. If they are weak or insufficient, they will knock down two historic pillars of the revolution begun more than half-a-century ago.

Let me start with food production. I just made a round-trip voyage to the center of the island. Almost one thousand kilometers of roads ranging from first-class highways to dirt roads that challenge even an ox-pulled cart.

The highway to the capital of Villa Clara provides proof for anyone who wants to take the pulse of the Cuban economy. At the end of the road, at the Kilometer 259 gasoline station, one of my fellow travelers, a housewife about 60, turns to me and, with a mixture of amazement and concern, tells me: “The truth is that I haven’t seen any agricultural activity.”

It’s a fact, all right, and one that challenges President Raúl Castro, who has called for a crusade against the invasive marabú bush. To the left and right of the highway, we see huge tracts of uncultivated land. Nowhere do we see even one head of cattle grazing peacefully.

Over and back, we see few passenger buses and fewer tourism buses. We see no trucks carrying a load (covered or uncovered) that might demonstrate commercial or entrepreneurial vigor. Not even a tractor pulling a trailer with bananas, pumpkins or sweet potatoes. We see very few peasants on the fields swinging a hoe.

Near the end of the return trip, things improve. In Mayabeque province, near the border with Havana, rises a complex of well-built produce stands that provide an image, a sort of mirage, that surprises the rider.

My vehicle stops before one of the stands, whose products are decorated with strings of garlic and onions, to make sure that the traveler understand that they are very real.

By then, the return to the capital, that city with more than 2 million people, brings me renewed hope – the last thing that people lose.

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