Life goes on the same for Cuba’s disabled… or worse

Life goes on the same for Cuba's disabled… or worse
August 7, 2013
Yusimí Rodríguez López

HAVANA TIMES – I'm afraid to go to Old Havana. Not because the police
might ask for my I.D., or the Cubans might take me for a tourist, but
because of the disabled, the lame and the mutilated who have begun to
form part of the landscape all along Obispo street.

I'm not frightened of what they could do to me; I don't see rage, or
anger, or any desire to take revenge on the world in their eyes (at
least, in the eyes of those who can see). What I fear is growing
accustomed to them – that from seeing them so often and in the face of
the great impossibility of ever doing anything for them, my soul will
harden and stop hurting me.

More than fear, I feel shame: not for anything I've done, but for what I
can't do.

Some of you may remember Jorge Luis Moreira, my interview subject in
"This Government Cares for its People Part 3". He was born with a
congenital malformation that has caused him to live in a wheelchair and
also to suffer from diabetes and incontinence.

But he's not lying prostrate at home with his mouth open like a baby
bird, waiting for someone to drop some food into it. That's a luxury
that not even the disabled can afford in this country.

I originally ran into him on Mercaderes St. He has a license to sell
provisions from a cart, although now he can't use it, and the products
are expensive, he would have to go long distances to find them. But he
goes to Old Havana to sell newspapers, and in hopes that some tourist or
other, pained by his situation, might decide to give him some money…

In that interview, Jorge told me that the police have detained him for
bothering the tourists. It would have seemed unbelievable to me that any
police official would arrest someone in his condition if I hadn't been
witness days previously to one of our agents of order and security
taking away a one-legged man who used a wheelchair.

I saw Jorge again last week, once again on Mercaderes St. where I met
him the first time and where I have run into him again a couple times.
His life is the same: a pension of 135 pesos ($7 USD) which isn't even
enough to eat badly.

When a tourist comes up to give him money, the guides try to dissuade
them, assuring them that our government gives those with disabilities
everything they need, and that these people are begging (although Jorge
is not a beggar) because they want to. When the police appear, those who
don't have a license to sell anything but do have a good pair of legs,
manage to escape, and he's the one they haul off.

What did I expect when I published his interview? What did he expect?
What could change? I gave him 30 cents in hard currency that I had in my
pocket, more to salve my conscience than to palliate his misery. At any
rate, it was like offering an aspirin against a cancer. He wouldn't be
in any less misery for my thirty cents (about 6 pesos in national
currency) nor have I been able to stop thinking about him since that
afternoon.

Is it the government's fault that Jorge was born with a congenital
malformation? No, it would be only stupid to blame the government; there
are people like Jorge, or worse off than Jorge, in all parts of the world.

Jorge's pension isn't enough to live on, the same way that the pension
for retired people isn't enough to live on and whose well-earned rest
after years of working consists of inventing new forms of subsistence
(and they are fortunate to be able to invent them). Jorge's pension
isn't enough to live on, just as Cuban workers' wages aren't enough to
live on, and whose future can be seen in the lives of those who are retired.

The retired look for a way to sell plastic shopping bags or newspapers;
they become messengers for the gas distribution agencies, or psychics
who read the cards or the palms of your hands. They "struggle" as we
say, and pay their taxes and their licenses – now that there's a license
for everything, including for letting yourself be photographed. What can
Jorge and others like him do, except depend on others' charity?

For years, our government promoted internationalism, solidarity aid for
countries that had suffered a disaster, or where there were more basic
necessities than in ours. Resources have been designated for these
places, medical personnel and Cuban technical workers, educated under
the umbrella of our state budgets, to alleviate the situation of people
in other lands.

Why then impede these disabled Cubans from receiving the tourists'
solidarity or ours, their fellow citizens, since the government can't
cover all their necessities?

But could that be a solution, to have the disabled live by begging? And
what if some brainiac decided to establish a license so that beggars had
to pay taxes?

I keep feeling that something is wrong, that begging shouldn't be the
solution for these people. At the same time, if the cost of living in
Cuba is such that the pensions they receive from the State are
inadequate, what right is there to keep them from finding a way to make
a living any way they can?

I haven't heard of any person with a disability assaulting someone in
broad daylight on Obispo St. It's hard for me to imagine a blind person
or a person without legs grabbing someone's wallet.

Jorge has been consumed with new worries since I interviewed him in
February. He says that there are rumors that the State is going to turn
all of its establishments for the sale of agricultural products over to
the self-employed workers. (With the supply and demand situation this
would mean higher consumer prices).

Here, people have learned from experience to give some credence to the
rumors that spread around the streets, no matter how far-fetched they
sound; especially if it's about something that could make their
situation worse.

Jorge wonders beforehand, and hopefully unnecessarily, how he's going to
eat if you can only buy agricultural products and meats from the
self-employed workers. I can't do anything more than look at him:
powerless to help, ashamed and certain that the next time I run into him
things won't have gotten any better for him.

Source: "Life goes on the same for Cuba's disabled…or worse" -
http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=97529