CUBA SAYS GOODBYE TO THE 20TH CENTURY
Leonardo Padura Fuentes
APRIL 2008 (IPS) - Recent confirmation that Cuban citizens living in
Cuba can finally have their own cell phones and buy computers, microwave
ovens, and DVD players with the local currency in local stores has
provoked amazement among the less informed and an ironic chuckle among
those familiar with the complex multiple realities of this Caribbean
island, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist
whose novels have been translated into 10 languages.
Padura writes that the possibility that the inhabitants of this magical,
mythic, and always surprising island will now be allowed access to these
goods leads automatically, however, to a formidable obstacle: all of
these devices must be paid for in ''hard currency''. A one or two-minute
cell phone call would cost an entire day's wages for a person who works
for the all-controlling state, which pays an average daily salary of 400
pesos, or 16 convertible pesos, equivalent to 16 dollars.
But the people say that doesn't matter: in the end they will have cell
phones. The fact that for the first time inhabitants of the island can
legally have a telephone that was not ''assigned'' them by the state,
watch on their DVD player something not broadcast by the government, or
use a computer to produce or gather information beyond the reach of the
state, is far more than a jump forward in time. It is a enormous and
im****tant increase in scope of free will in a country suffocated by
systems of prohibitions and control.
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