14ymedio, Mercedes García, Sancti Spíritus, 30 November 2024 — Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel’s trips to Sancti Spíritus have their preamble and their coda. Before the Cuban leader arrives, it is easy to detect that the presidential motorcade is approaching: the collection of garbage, the hurried painting of the facades and the operation around the Communist Party’s guest house where he is staying give him away. But also, when he leaves, he leaves a trail, some touch-ups to convey the message that his presence has been worthwhile. This week the hustle and bustle has culminated in a food fair.
In the Kilo 12 neighborhood, this Saturday, sales points for food, fruit and other basic products were improvised. A table with sweet cookies here, a stand with pumpkins and some stunted yuccas there, next to trucks that, without even unloading the merchandise, hurried customers to buy 2.5 kilogram packages of frozen chicken at 1,580 pesos each. A starving horse pulled a cart that carried plantains and some tiny malangas. “There is almost nothing,” grumbled an old woman who warned: “those sweet potatoes have so much dirt stuck to them that you don’t even know what they are.”
A long line suggested some cheap merchandise, but the reality was white sugar at 380 pesos, a slightly lower price than the 400 that the product cost this week in the city’s MSMEs. In the long line, a woman detailed the difficulties she encountered when, on Friday, she wanted to approach Díaz-Canel to tell him about the housing problems she suffers in a home with part of the roof collapsed and her two elderly parents bedridden. When the woman tried to get to one of the points visited by the party leader, a barrier of State Security agents stopped her. “They told me that there was already a list of people who could speak with him and that I was not included.”
There was no shortage of fights and pushing at the fair. A girl of about ten years old walked near those waiting to buy and asked, in a barely audible voice, for 50 pesos to “eat something.” Around noon, an elderly man collapsed and suffered an epileptic attack. “The poor man hasn’t been able to take his pills for weeks because there aren’t any in the pharmacy,” explained a young woman who was with him. None of the stalls were accepting electronic payments, so customers had to pay out huge wads of bills to take the products home.
At about noon, the number of visitors had decreased because word had spread in the nearby neighborhoods that “the fair is bad.” The merchants began to collect the boxes and bags with everything they could not sell. The show was over. The visitor for whom the fair was staged was already hundreds of kilometers away.
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