Most likely, Gabriel does not currently have a small bottle of liquefied gas for cooking at home.
As is the case for many Cuban families today, it has been a long time since the last bottle was purchased. The price has increased many times over, making it difficult to afford.
However, when the next ship with gas arrives in Santiago de Cuba, the distribution will not be stopped, as it happened last time, because the part invented by Gabriel and his companions from Maquinado solved the serious matter in the “gas bottle filler” of the neighboring refinery.
Gabriel and his companions work at the Renté thermoelectric plant, but that does not mean that their house is not lit for less hours than those of the rest of the people of Santiago, of the Cubans who are suffering from long blackouts.
Like Gabriel, there are millions of Cubans hit by the cruel economic conditions that entangle our daily lives to put a plate on the table every day, turn on the stove, have electricity for all the basic things that depend on it, move to work and return, that our salary is enough for just one thing of what we need for the month.
But also, like Gabriel, there are millions who, even so, day after day, put all their energy and ingenuity into looking for alternatives to alleviate the shortage at home and at their workplace, and go to work, and try to do the best they can and know how, so that, despite all that is lacking, there is a result that contributes economically, socially, and there is income where it is produced, and satisfaction where a service is offered, and beauty where there is artistic creation, and a helping hand to those who are left without options, and that there is relief in medical care and light of knowledge in the workshop that is the school.
There are people who reject the word effort, so much so that we have reduced it in the discourse of generalization, that bag in which individual heroism is not distinguished, in the midst of the same shortages of all.
However, the country that is being built today is made possible by the sum of the small and great efforts of so many good people who work, without losing hope that progress will finally begin to be seen and consolidated, with direct and rapid expression in the home of each person, in the welfare of each family.
This cannot be ignored, nor can the main fault of the obstinacy of those neighbors across the street to “make life miserable” for us Cubans. They have already said it in plain language: the Revolution has to fall, even if it means killing its people with hunger and disease. You have to be blind not to see that this is exactly what they are trying to do!
It is true that explanations are not enough for a people suffering from shortages, but the blockade of the United States government is a reality that explains itself, because it is seen and suffered every minute; although, of course, we have to continue communicating better, in detail, stripping it of all the adjectives that dress it up as a pretext, which is a danger that is run, especially when the war is as long as this one, of more than 60 years, that Cuba is waging against the most powerful power on the planet.
To that murderous policy, and specifically to the latest measures that the anti-Cuban mafia has made sure that the government of Donald Trump intensifies against our Island, we owe the severe situation we are suffering today; with examples as clear as the fact that there is not enough diesel for everything that is required (including electricity generation, right now with suitable engines, but paralyzed for lack of that fuel), or the difficulties to pay for liquefied gas in ships anchored off our coasts.
Who is capable of ignoring the lie of accusing Cuba of being a terrorist country, and the extreme cruelty that means that this absurd qualification only serves to stop many nations from trading with us, and the banks do not accept the little cash that is available, because we do not have the right to credits and other normal mechanisms in world trade?
What explains, if not the fact of depriving us of foreign currency, that tourists from all over the world are sanctioned by the U.S. for coming to Cuba?
Recently, an unpronounceable government official, as high-ranking as he is corrupt, said that they will be so creative with Cuba that its people will have to bear the necessary sacrifices to achieve that “greater good” which would be to overthrow the government of the Island. What a generous will!
This is called genocide, a practice that U.S. administrations dominate and have tried with impudence and impunity, from the nuclear attack on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the unconditional support to the fascist regime of Israel in its massacre against the Palestinian people.
It is to denounce this economic genocide against Cuba, the longest in world history against any country, that the people have been called to the squares on the following Thursday, May 1st, International Workers' Day. Not since the deadly threat of the pandemic and the consequent economic crisis had a parade of such magnitude been called for.
However, although there is no longer epidemiological danger, we do know that the economic circumstances are no better; on the contrary, they are more severe on fronts that decide the normal development of the country, because among the causes is greater the viciousness of our enemy to break the unity and, in the chronic shortage and the induced state of survival, to break the will of resistance of the Cuban people.
We learned from Fidel that in the most difficult and dangerous times, unity must be more than just a well-known fact, it must be demonstrated, because the claim of an entire country, said aloud, does not go unnoticed by the world, and adds more just people to the cause that defends the Revolution, whose highest concept Fidel also bequeathed to us, just on May 1st, 25 years ago.
That is what the working people of the whole archipelago are summoned to, together with thousands of friends from all over the world who will accompany us: to turn every square into a tribune of denunciation against those who want to see us defeated and submissive.
