14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez, Generation Y, Havana, 11 August 2019 — The poet T.S. Eliot was wrong… or at least his most famous verse does not work in the case of Cuba. “April is the cruelest month,” he wrote almost a hundred years ago, but on this Island that adjective belongs to August, the most difficult time of the year. After long weeks under the intense heat of summer, the days of August generate widespread irritation, a tendency to scream and rage.
To that we must add that the tortuous official bureaucracy becomes even more difficult to circumvent because many state entities work at half strength, many employees in that sector are on vacation and the phones of the institutions can ring for hours without anyone answering. In this eighth month of the year, suffocation and lethargy, despair and anger, are sharpened. Phrases like “better leave it for September” or “you won’t be able to do anything until August passes” are repeated everywhere.
Lovers repel each other with their sweat, buses are rolling saunas and the few air-conditioned offices become a fiefdom that employees defend tooth and nail from “non-authorized persons,” that is, citizens, who try enter to access services and incidentally enjoy temperatures under 77F. Everyone who has a fan in a public place feels themselves lord and owner of the situation, turning it to cool just their face, their desk, their small plot of power.
Oh, T.S. Eliot, how wrong you were with April, how good it seems that you never spent an August in Havana…
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