Identidades in English No 4, December 2014 | Page 36

municipality also in Artemisa province, Xiomara
Frómeta was informed that if she kept her 15
year-old daughter in the special school, they’d
take away her pension. So the mother decided not
to send her daughter to that school anymore. Xiomara tells the story of a social worker who told
her that her special food subsidy, meant for dystrophic children, had taken away “because children like her were not going to gain anymore,
because the children in her area did not go up in
weight,” referring, of course, to her body weight.
She also bemoans her serious housing problems,
which put both her daughter’s and her own life at
risk, despite the fact she has made multiple attempts to talk to different official authorities and
institutions for a number of years.
The shift from socialism, which was sustained by
subsidies that made possible a large amount of
welfare, to a savage State capitalism whose attitude is “every man for himself,” has plunged an
indeterminate but large number of people into
poverty, particularly older people and families
that care for disabled relatives.
A third case that exemplifies how the poor - for
whom it was said the Revolution was fought have been abandoned is that of Heriberta León
Morales and her son Yadriel Frómeta, who is 14
and has been diagnosed with moderate mental retardation and severe psychomotor issues.
Ever since her son’s early years, Heriberta has
asked “to commit him, to receive some help with
him, because my nerves are quite shot” and he “is
aggressive and I have to care for him all day long.
There are days when I can’t even prepare just one
meal.” All of her complaints to social workers or
other functionaries and institutions have been in
vain. She affirms that comments made - that the
authorities had found an institution at which to
place him and she had refused the offer - are false:
“It’s a lie. I’ve been asking for years and they
never resolved anything.”This case is even worse
because the Municipal Housing Authority in San
Antonio de los Baños switched her and her family
from their rural home, which was in a dangerous
place for her son, to a room in town. It is in
deplorable condition and they gave her no
resources for repairing it on her own.

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The inability to create wealth under the system
imposed by the Castro brothers makes it
impossible to have enough capital to
appropriately maintain basic infrastructural
demands—services, production and social
security. In addition, excessive governmental
centralization is made ever worse by concomitant
indolence and corruption of many functionaries
throughout the chain of command. They
dilapidate or disappear a portion of the resources
meant for social security, which makes
impossible the fulfillment of the declaration in the
official report, “Different Children with Equal
Rights.” Decentralization, as well as transparency
in government and public administration,
freedom of the press, emancipation of the

Heriberta and Yadriel
workforce, and a functioning legal system that
favor the generation of individual wealth and
proportionate contributions to the national
budget, are the things will actually improve the
social security system.
This and only this, in addition to a political will
on the part of our government officials to craft
public policies that focus on people and not on
partisan political goals and numbers to show off
to the world, will eliminate the existence of
Cubans who are living in extreme need and who
have been abandoned to their fate, as they were in
the past and are now.