“The only better years that the Revolution had were the ten years from 1980 to 1989. When the socialist bloc broke up, [we entered] the so-called Special Period, which is a mockery – they labeled hunger ‘special’. But this one [today] arrived. These are the worst times since 1959. They are horrible, disastrous. People are dying because there is no medicine. People are not healthy; they are barely surviving.”
“People lived off of pennies. If you want, I can tell you about the prices before 1959. For example, there was the price of rice, which was rising in value. As the value of rice increased, so did the quality, of course. That was rice. On the other hand, a package of four sausages cost six cents. A small can of sardines cost six cents. A large can of sardines cost twenty cents. And I remember in the 1930s, it was four chickens for a peso. And in the fifties, an egg was worth three cents. So, people lived with pennies; pesos weren’t needed. A worker could earn thirty pesos a week. And with thirty pesos a week, when I worked, I dressed myself nicely, drank beer, had breakfast, lunch, dinner, drank coffee, and smoked. All that with thirty pesos a week. I traveled, too. In other words, life was lived with very little money and lived very happily. Very happily. As soon as Fidel arrived, this started going backwards, backwards, backwards, like a crab, and from that moment on, nobody knew what to call this. This has become a real misfortune. We are existing without living.”
Reinaldo Zayas Rivas was born on July 5th, 1934, in a poor neighborhood of Havana. He retired at the age of 60, but out of necessity, was forced to return to work until the age of 70. Later, he became a “carretillero” - a street candy vendor – a job he held for another 15 years until the Covid-19 pandemic closed his business. Nowadays, he still lives in the same neighborhood, sharing the house with his son, and receives a pension of 1500 pesos per month that is not enough for anything, condemning him to suffer from critical scarcity. He blames the Cuban totalitarian regime for this scarcity, as it came to power in 1959, and because of his nine decades of life, Reinaldo has the ability to compare the before-and-after of the Castro regime.
