IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 6 ENGLISH | Page 64

The New Mavericks
Armando Soler Hernández
Journalist
Havana, Cuba
The world’s greatest evil
is not poverty of the have-nots,
but rather the oblivion of the haves.
J. Lebret

T

hey live like furtive, anonymous
urbanites, hidden amongst the
multitude. They are economic
renegades, like the feisty, street-smart
blacks of yore, during the colonial era,
as if hiding from their owners. Unlike
those runaway slaves of the Havana
mangroves who became delinquents,
these contemporary ones work, but
removed from the State’s obsessive
vigilance and control over work in Cuba.
They found a way to earn a living
honestly and, above all, in complete
freedom. Sugar mills, their professional
talents, and daily audacity allow them to
find a space and survive not only outside
the “Big Brother is watching you”
phenomenon, but also completely
unknown and undetectable to the State’s
zealous control. They reasons are many,
but all really boil down to one: they
consider that they have been defrauded.
They believe they gave too much of their
lives in exchange for ever diminishing
salaries that were unrealistic in terms of
constant
(and
officially
never

mentioned) inflation, shortages, and a
motive for corruption.

El Fígaro
When we meet by chance, Fígaro’s
small and very clear, blue eyes shine;
they are even paler next to his brickcolored skin that reeks of early morning
drinking. “I stopped working for these
people (the State) 25 years ago. I am
now 72. I graduated from the University
with a degree in economics. If I ever got
anything from it, it was being able to
calculate that the country was falling
economically short, and would not
improve in the future.1 Now tell me I
was wrong.” He makes a sweeping
gesture with his hand, possibly including
in it the enormous pile of garbage on the
shady park’s corner. From a starred bag
he extracts a pair of barber’s scissors,
and shows them to me: “This was what
gave me my independence. It was during
the Special Period, at its height, and
some started to leave their State jobs and
try to do something out on the street.

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