Pardon my absence yesterday, the first day of my solo sojourn. As some of you might now, your current narrator will be commencing a petite tour de monde, starting on March the 15th or so. The current situation is like a warm-up training, and quite useful as such. I spent the last evening wandering along the malecón, using all my fabolous people-ignoring skills.
And during that walk, it really hit me like a train, full frontal: As long as income differences as we know them exsist, the hustlers, conners, whores and false friends (I met about a dozend of each during the three hours I spent walking), will continue to thrive and multiply. (Yeah, should have thought of that earlier, right? I really need to work on my impermeability to that stuff.)
The revolution in Cuba exists. There´s practically no advertising, except for governmental inspirational bulletins at major intersections. Otherwise, this is an ad-free zone. But this country is essentially capitalist, as it lives in a capitalist world.
Got money? No problem, do anything you want. Got none? Big problem.
Lots of people still profit to a certain degree from free education. Professors and pupils sometimes don´t even bother to show up. There´s about one good (and pseudomilitary elitist lenin-named) school in each province, the rest is.. well, imagine a "Hauptschule" in one of the outer districs in Vienna, add school uniforms, and you got it.
Free medicine! Yay! Forget it. It might be free, it might be Cubas beacon of triumph, but for Cubans, it remains a farce. Cuba exports its doctors. Which means that the demand here is often not really covered.
So far, so bad. Now back to work.
-thaelmann-
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