Fernando Dámaso, 12 May 2020 — Hoarding happens when there is scarcity. When the latter is eliminated, the former disappears. It cannot be eliminated by persecution, repression, or confiscation.
In Cuba, during the Republican era, I remember the hoarding of certain products such as lard imported from Chicago, Castile soap, and fuels, during World War II. At war’s end, scarcity ended too, and, consequently, so did the practice of hoarding.
Cubans had the custom of shopping for the freshest products needed on a given day — hoarding was not habitual. Hoarding was institutionalized by the “accident” of January 1959 and has continued, more or less, for the last six decades. Now, because of the economic crisis plus the Coronavirus, it is at a high.
If you are the proprietor of a cafeteria or paladar, and you wish to keep them functioning in the face of market instability and lack of wholesale outlets, you must resort to hoarding — which does not mean, as is claimed, that all hoarded items are illegal.
What is truly illegitimate is not keeping the population properly provisioned, for which the total responsibility lies with the monopolistic State. There is also hoarding by those who intend to re-sell the items at a higher price. In either case, the cause is the same: scarcity.
The persecution of so-called hoarders (almost always self-employed workers) is nothing more than a smokescreen to distract the attention of the citizens from the grave problems the country faces and of the causes behind the shortages, which are provoked not by the supposed hoarding, but by the unproductivity of a failed system that is incapable of producing resources. As long as in Cuba personal wealth is condemned and poverty promoted, we will continue being a nation of have-nots. Of course, this is not a universal condition! There are authorized rich people.
There are many “pantries full of products” here belonging to the powerful “untouchables of the regime” — to whose residences law enforcement officials have no access — and therefore although these higher-ups also engage in hoarding, they are not taken to court or featured on those TV shows that are produced more to instill fear than to solve the problem. The thing is, they create the problem themselves, those who constitute the actual problem. The branches of the “corruption” tree are pruned, but the roots are left in place, due to the many vested interests that impede their removal.
This gross manipulation is supported by many Cubans, who think that these so-called hoarders are the cause of their difficulties. The decades of ideological brutalization have done their dirty work, and this is the result: the slaves attack each other, with the consent of the slaveholder. Collective mediocrity has replaced the traditional civic-mindedness of Cubans.
Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison
