The old dame returns from Cuba

The old dame returns from Cuba

My 94 year old mother has returned from visiting Cuba where she still has a younger brother and a sister. Even though her trip was rather short; it was long enough for her to make some very interesting and revealing observations.
After 50 years of a totalitarian dictatorship, Cuba is now at its worse. They are suffering from shortages that even at the height of the “Special Periods” did not reflect the need and in general the lack of foodstuffs and basic everyday items.
There is a serious shortage of common goods like coffee and meat. She said the bread was an abomination and that there are no spices or onions so that the food tasted bland and was never well balanced. There was one simple advantage she had: she carried money and that made a world of difference. Ordinary Cubans have so little income that even home grown vegetables are out of their reach.
She said that there is a pervasive sense of doom and that generally people have a way of approaching everything with a negative attitude. She sees how anything carried to an extreme as is the case of Cuba can be so terribly wrong. She is also drawing parallels and says that even if the free enterprise system is the best model, it has to have regulations and a certain amount of social programs integrated into it so that there exists safety nets and a degree of security for the general public. Cuba is the example of just the opposite and after fifty years it shows the terrible consequences of a system on the radical left gone tragically wrong.
The repression is a bit more severe as people tend to complain more when things are bad so that they are conducting again those “Repudiation Brigades” where they bring in people from other neighborhoods and station them in front of the houses of dissidents to harass and insult those who do not agree with the Castro regime. Does that sound familiar? Town Hall Meetings come to mind.