By Nike

HAVANA TIMES – I want to write to you about the various opinions I hear every day when I go out into the streets of my Cuba.

Sometimes I give my own opinion, and other times I just observe, because some comments are so outrageous. Along the way, I encounter people crossing paths in search of their daily food.

As I leave my house, I see a young man selling bread—pan de flauta or pan de libra, as they call it here—and I love his street cry: “Good bread!” Behind him, a woman in her 60s, from eastern Cuba judging by her accent and with the robust look of a criolla, though clearly undernourished, looks at me and says: “Just wait until the inspectors they’re sending from Santiago de Cuba arrive—they’ll put an end to this expensive bread.”

I ask her, “Why do you say that?”

She answers, almost with hatred in her eyes: “Because Havana takes all the flour in the country. They’re going to get fined up to 64,000 pesos. It’s because of the people from Havana that the country is the way it is.”

I continue on my way and arrive at the produce stand. There’s a small line. A neighbor who’s buying—around 63 years old—is talking about the usual topic: scarcity. Looking at everyone in line, she says: “This didn’t happen with Fidel. When he was alive, the monthly rations were there on the first day and complete, so you could pick them up whenever you wanted. And there was no hunger, and transportation was excellent.”

This woman was born into a family deeply committed to the government. Her father was a party official who traveled a lot; her mother was a school principal. She grew up in an environment of socialist abundance because her parents benefited from the system. The poor woman is confused; like her parents, she justifies scarcity with the embargo. It is their minds that are blocked. And I wonder if the only thing that matters to her is eating—and eating poorly at that.

I go into a government store and decide to buy a comb that has been marked down to 25 cents. When I ask for it, the clerk tells me, “Don’t buy it, it’s rotten.” So I ask, “Why don’t they take it off the shelves?” She just shrugs… a complete absurdity.

I also meet people of all ages who are very excited about a radical change in the country’s politics. They are eagerly waiting for it. They’ve regained the desire to live, and that hope that their reality will change gives them a better attitude—even good humor. For them, it’s a fact that they will live to see that change, and that it’s already very close.

This weekend, at least in the capital, the electricity hasn’t been cut, and everyone is wondering why. There’s uncertainty: will it happen or not? The woman across the street doesn’t even want to talk about it, as if speaking of it might break the spell and our worries might reach some powerful entity that, upon hearing us, would wake up and cut the power, leaving us in darkness for who knows how long. She just says: “I’m scared!”

As I reach the town center, I run into a friend—one of the few left, because most have left the country. He calls me by my full name, something we do when we’ve gone through primary and secondary school together. We talk about the same thing: how bad things have gotten. He tells me he works on his own, and that to eat properly he buys two eggs a day—that’s his breakfast, the most important meal of the day. I can see life has treated him harshly, but he keeps a good spirit.

Cubans are surviving an inferno, and we’re doing it well. I admire their strength to reinvent themselves every day and to face their hardships with new ideas. They manage it because they don’t give up or grow tired. I know many who do it daily. You must not let yourself be defeated, you always have to try, even if the devil himself is your enemy. We have the truth.

Read more from Nike’s diary here on Havana Times.