AndCuban old man The 89-year-old admitted that the food shortage is affecting him greatly and took the opportunity to compare the last decades on the island with the time he lived before 1959, where he assures that he could live off his work perfectly.
“Hunger is killing me”Reinaldo Zayas Rivas confessed in overwhelming statements to the independent mediaCubanet.
“From 1959 to date those are the worst times”, added the old man, who described that period as “horrible and disastrous.”
He referred in particular to recent years, where “people are getting sick and dying because there is no medicine, where people are not feeding themselves, they are subsisting.”
Zayas Rivas says that before '59 many things cost pennies and that this meant that he, with a salary of 30 pesos a week, could live decently.
He alluded to the prices of rice, sausages, sugar, mortadella, bread, eggs and other basic foods that are now subject to the brutal inflation that prevails on the island.
"Here we are experiencing horrible hunger. Here we are living like a miracle, hunger is killing me", he reiterated.
About the arrival ofFidel Castro to power reveals that at the beginning everything was “very nice, very free but later, over time...even those who fought in Playa Girón no longer agreed with the revolution and many discovered that everything was a lie.”
Regarding the process that unleashed the crisis, he says that it was progressive, first they put the booklet, then in the 70s came the era that was defined as dry law and then in the 90s the Special Period, which he described as a mockery due to the confusing term chosen to define something that was very bad.
Reinaldo Zayas believes that the 1980s were the most prosperous decade with the fewest needs for citizens, but it preceded the harsh decade that would come later.
The old man assures that in reality “Love for the revolution” is no longer felt by anyone, but what some people are committed to is the country, which makes it clear that it is not the same.
“There is no one revolutionary here, here there are many who disguise themselves as revolutionaries for a living and much less communists. “Not even Fidel was a communist.”, says the old man, who said that Fidel Castro popularized politics to “entertain” the people.
“If you want them to come look for me, I have nothing to lose now,” he concluded, referring to the possible consequences of his stark statements.
Elderly people marked by the crisis
The elderly have been, without a doubt, one of the groups most affected by the crisis in recent years. It is a fact that every day it is more common to find older people in Cuba who survive by begging for alms, searching for food scraps in the garbage and even sleeping on the street.
Begging has increased significantly on the island in a context marked by inflation, shortages of basic products and low salaries and pensions.
In recent months, people with a mental or physical disability or elderly people without family or home have wandered alone or sometimes accompanied by a pet. They can be seen lying on old cardboard in streets, parks, doorways and bus stops throughout the country.
At the same time, on social networks more and more Cubans have noted the seriousness of the phenomenon of begging, especially among the elderly, a reality that for decades the regime assured could not be found on the streets of the country.
The elderly, most of whom do not have a cell phone or have limited access to technology, will be affected by not being able to buy and pay in the services that have enabled electronic payment in the middle of the banking process.
DatoWorld, a renowned international electoral observatory that evaluates parameters such as per capita income, access to health services, social security, food and housing spaces, announced in recent days that Cuba is currently the most poorest in Latin America, with a 72 percent poverty rate.
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