Slapped in the Face by Underdevelopment

Slapped in the Face by Underdevelopment
October 3, 2014
Ernesto Carralero

HAVANA TIMES — As a Cuban teenager, I consider running into a decent
pizza an unforgettable experience, let alone being in Holland.

My mother lives in the Netherlands and she took me to spend the holidays
with her. Even though I had already lived there before, back then I was
a small boy and like most kids, I didn't pay much attention nor give a
lot of importance to the things around me. Now that I was a teenager, I
was a lot more critical, more relaxed, more conscious of the world… to
observe the First World again was truly an unforgettable experience.

The jump from Cuban reality to Dutch reality seemed very abrupt.

I remember that in the beginning, I'd try and identify a noise that
sounded like clapperboard whilst I'd cross the street, and I was
surprised to come across it at every traffic light (I swear there were
times that I thought that my mind was slipping away), until somebody
explained to me that it was a way to let the blind know when the
pedestrian light was green and that the sound would gradually become
quieter as time was running out and the pedestrian light would turn red.

Another day, while I was coming out of a shop, I walked straight into
the shop windows that were so clean you could barely notice them.

That was when it hit me: when a Cuban leaves Cuba and sees the world
outside, it really is the simplest things that surprise us the most,
more than the skyscrapers or the "Flowers Park".

Leaving a supermarket, I saw a woman who was particularly offended as a
dog had defecated in the entrance. A shop assistant quickly cleaned up
the mess and I said to myself, 'If this woman came to Old Havana, she'd
never set foot in Cuba again!'

Cuba isn't Holland, of that I'm sure. But I don't believe that a country
needs an out-of-this-world economy to learn to keep things clean. Would
it be so difficult for a Cuban to take a plastic bag when walking the
dog to clean up his mess? Or for the government to fence-off a green
space or two and dedicate them exclusively to this end like they do in
the First World?

In spite of Cuba's material shortages, I think that we could still take
small individual actions that can help us to improve the state of things
here. Unfortunately, the sense of indifference is so widespread that
there are only a few people left that care about such basic things such
as being able to walk down the street without having to worry about
washing their shoes when they get home.

At shops, I learned that if you recycle an empty soft drink bottle, they
give you a coupon so that the next one you buy works out cheaper. While
at home, I used to see the collection of raw materials as almost a
social event, I saw that with a small incentive people make an effort on
the other side of the ocean. Couldn't a Cuban store do the same and at
the same time make soft drinks a little more accessible to people?
Wouldn't this be both profitable and educational?

But, what really surprised me was the goodwill people had to act and
improve things, something that unfortunately I don't see in Cuba. Cubans
have become accustomed to dirty streets and overflowing dumpsters and
therefore don't do anything about it.

This was the hardest slap in the face that underdevelopment has given
me: realizing that very few people actually care about making things
better even though this is within our reach.

Source: Slapped in the Face by Underdevelopment - Havana Times.org -
http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=106508