- 17 Feb 2012 15:39
#13898220
I guess I should clarify a couple of points. When I was in Cuba, we used the rationing card (the Tarjeta) as a basic building block of our diet. The card had pages, and when one bought an item the page was ticked off, punched, or scribbled upon. But having the card didn't mean one had the food - we had to hussle to find the food itself, and quite often we didn't find it. "There isn't any" (No hay), was a pretty common response.
So how did we supplement the ration? My family had resources others didn't have, because my dad was a physician, and people have a tendency to try to make sure their doctor doesn't starve, so he was offered deals to buy black market food. Buying black market food could be dangerous because they would really put a person in jail for dealing in the black market. I have one political aunt who spent time in a women's jail because she had a large bag full of meat.
Anyway, the food supply had to be supplemented with the black market, and we hussled to get the food. We also bartered a lot. So I was taught that, if I was walking down the street and I saw a line, to get in it, and somehow get a message to my parents that I was in line. It didn't matter if they were selling Chinese toasters, or Potemkin Razor Blades, the idea was to buy stuff, then barter to get food or other stuff. Toothpaste, soap, and toilet paper were really good barter items, because everybody used them.
We also planted a vegetable garden and raised rabbits, but that meant we had to stay up keeping the thieves away, so in the end we sort of let the garden decay, and my parents got a pretty good deal with black marketeers who traded for medicines my dad stole from the hospital. And if you don't get it, in Cuba everybody stole at work. I hear they still do it.
It has been many years since I was able to escape Castro's gulag, so my memory gets fuzzy sometimes. I do know that, when I bought my first pair of jeans in the US, after I left Cuba, my waist size was 28, and I was 6 ft tall. So I was definitely skinny, although I wouldn't say I was underfed.
Nobody in my family starved, we always managed to find food. When it got bad, relatives and friends pitched in. But we were obsessed with the lack of food, it's like a relentless pressure, worrying about it. And we worried about it even when we were young, because as I mentioned above, children were taught to stand in line and make sure they scoured for food wherever it could be found. And the thing is, we were middle class, and we even had a maid in our house, so it was pretty weird, my parents were professionals, highly educated, and we worried about eating so much, it was obsessive. Other things were a hassle, like the lack of toilet paper, or lack of running water and electricity.
I think what bothered the adults in my family more than anything, was knowing that all the shortages and the pain were caused by people like Che Guevara and Fidel, who were incredibly stupid when it came to economics or managing things. And all of us really resented their strutting and their arrogance, telling the rest of us they knew better, Marx and Lenin blah blah blah, yackety bleeeh blaaah. The mother f*ckers were bad people, they did not stand a single word of dissent, and yet they made mistake upon mistake. It was as if the Mad Hatter had been crossed with Adolf Hitler, and had the ability to run our lives.
I think if you're in China and you starve, at least you know there's one billion Chinese and people always starve in China, but damn it, we didn't have to live like that. They were ruining our lives for what? So they could wear their red hankies and sing crappy songs?
I understand now things have changed, and they have dollar stores (or what they call CUC stores), where people can buy food openly at usurious prices. So I send money to my family in Cuba so they buy food and get ripped off by the "communists" who run things, who are more like fascist sunbitches and who I'm sure some day will be kicked out.
When Fidel dies, if I'm still alive, I'll toast and tell the devil to enjoy himself, because he has a juicy soul he can use to play. If I were Eminem, and I could rhyme, I would post something else, using the right language, a nice rap where I tell Fidel and Raul Castro they are garbage, with a punchy line at the end, something like screw you and have a nice day.
I guess this doesn't have much to do with South African unemployment. I worked in Africa, and in general it seems to me they need to learn some birth control, and to avoid tribal infighting. I don't think those countries they got are real, seem to be glued together as a result of colonial times, and there is no sense of nationality. But heck, people in the UK are always arguing they are not English, and they still manage to get things done. And I don't think the problems Africans have can be solved by capitalism or socialism or any other ism as long as they are collapsing their environment and fighting between tribes the way they do. I got Cuban relatives who fought in Angola, and they feel really bitter about the way they got drawn into what amounted to tribal warfare by a bunch of savages. That war didn't mean anything.
marx was wrong
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