A State under an embargo has the prohibition of doing business with all those nations with which it has entered into conflict or in military tension or with those that are adverse to geopolitical causes. The embargo also impose on it the drastic prohibition to trade in basic necessities, such as food and medicines, with the consequent rationalization of their internal stocks, up to the extreme limit of survival. A strategy, this one, adopted against the actions of some Governments but which generates, however, crude realities that drastically affect the weaker social classes. In recent history, concrete examples are Yugoslavia, Iraq and Cuba. The most representative case is the Cuban one. El Bloqueo, as the Cubans call it, is the longest embargo in the history of modern-day humanity. The first sanctions against Cuba date back to 1959, when Fidel Castro nationalized over one billion American assets on the island. The embargo was made official in 1962 when the Cuban government signed a trade agreement with the Soviet Union. How much it cost in Cuba in economic terms is hard to know, how much it is weighed on its people you see it in its streets.
In November 2014, traveling to Cuba, I experienced the dualism of its society and I was constantly accompanied by the feeling of being back in time. A journey into the Paradise of contradictions. An island that is not easy to describe because when you close your eyes and you let Cuba carry you you can feel it while it touches you, hugs you, welcomes you and smiles, but then suddenly like a stab you feel it presents its raw reality: Fifty years of embargo. A reality with two opposing and controversial faces, parallel and unknown roads.
Touristic luxury disappears as you cross the alleys and Havana City shows another face, the one that is in a state of complete abandonment. A state of neglect made of ruins, old dilapidated buildings with peeling paint, dusty streets with chasms and puddles, houses without doors and without windows where it is absurd to think that someone can live there until you see the clothes hanging.
On island there are the rich and then there are the very poor Cubans. A dualism that stands before the eyes everywhere. There are the homeless, the beggars, those who rummage in garbage cans. And then there is the double currency that has widened even further the gap between the social classes. Cubans earning CUC live in dignity; those who earn with the monedanacional can barely survive. And then everyone is forced to scrape some more coins.
The windows open on the ground floor of many buildings show goods of various kinds. In reality they are not shops but homes. Two parallel worlds, on one side there is the official economy regulated by the rigid laws of the State, on the other side there is the underground economy that is a pure liberalism. Few food goods, frugal cuisine. Even buying a hat, jeans or a t-shirt for the Cubans costs a monthly salary.
Havana is classified as one of the most polluted cities in the world. You can not breathe in Havana. The fifties machine features and the coal-fired power plant chimneys, built a few meters from the school and the baseball field, emit black and dense fumes all day long.
Everywhere in Cuba, the past is omnipresent.
Schools, decadent and dominated by toxic fumes, have the bare necessities.
On the streets you see people walking without a precise destination, working, waiting for a tip or simply sitting on the sidewalk to watch life inexorably running before them.
Next to the luxury hotels and the old colonial houses are the forgotten suburbs. The spaces are tight; the wooden shacks, close to each other, barely let the sun's rays pass in rooms where the essential is opposed to the luxury of the nearby tourist quarters. Through the doors always open see the women who wash the floors, the barefoot children playing in the poor rooms and also see the women who make prostitutes near the consenting husbands.
When the afternoon comes and the colors of the sunset fall on the island you can see the carefree and unsuspecting boys playing on the Bay of Pigs beach. You understand then that here what matters is the essential. A simple arranged kite becomes a precious object here. Tied to his rope caresses the sky, the same sky that April 17, 1961 saw the invasion of this Bay by 1,453 Cuban exiles who had the aim of overthrowing the regime of Fidel Castro. The invasion lasted only two days and proved to be a failure for the rebels, who were defeated and partly captured by Castro's troops. There is no story in those boys' eyes, but there is no hope either.
Crossing Cuba, you realize what is the reality of this people, what are the real moments of life of these people. What happens in this corner of the world reads him in the lost and sad eyes of the girls who offer their bodies to the tourists to survive or while you decide to climb, at four in the morning, on the tren de Hershey connecting Havana to Matanzas. In reality it is only a cluster of scrap metal that the Cubans call a train. A journey made in the dark, a path behind which there is the pure essence of this land, its bare and raw reality. Sitting in a dirty and foul-smelling carriage, inside a wagon of the early twentieth century, consumed by thousands of miles. The silent driver stays all the way with the door open. Tinker with levers paying attention to the road. It passes point-blank between the houses, where cement debris and silos take the place of flowers and wooden fences.
Cuba is a place out of time made up of people, faces, looks, eyes that penetrate your soul. You remain suspended between heaven and earth while a flash runs through the thoughts and realizes what is the true magic of this island: the simple essentiality. Their life, so different from ours, perpetually struggling with a daily life made of sacrifices, of having to arrange, of having to share the little with everyone, to do everything with nothing. A life, that of the Cuban people, which at times seems illogically serene. A people, this, survived the longest embargo in modern history.
