The human spirit is an amazing thing

Cubans seem to be suffering from a rather absurd version of the Stockholm Syndrome. I can’t imagine a collective group of people with less hope and opportunity in the world. It’s as if someone hit the pause button in 1964 and for the last 40 years things have been getting progressively worse.

Cuba didn’t open itself up to tourism until 1993 and only then because it was forced to since the Soviets would no longer be propping up their failed experiment in Communism, excuse me, I mean Socialism. They did go to all the effort of changing the billboards after all.

The average government job (the only legal jobs available) pays $15 a month. It costs an average of $65 a month to have a place to live and enough food not to starve. That basically means everyone is doing something illegal to get by. The lack of respect for the rule of law has led to an amazing decline in the morality of the country. Literally everyone in the country is a criminal as evidenced by the sheer fact that they are still alive. Stealing is no longer thought of as stealing, just what one needs to do in order to subsist.

Of course Cuba has got to be one of the safest places in the world. Violent crime is virtually unheard of. I guess that is one benefit of a police state. And when people are literally eating dog-food in order to keep from starving it’s good to know they’ve found a use for every extra dollar Fidel can get his hands on.

But through all of this, people actually seem rather happy. They have their amazing music and festive dance. They have cheap rum and great cigars. They have close-knit families and friends for life. And really not much more, but then again, does anybody really need anything else? The only ones really pissed off are the young men, they have absolutely nothing to look forward to except getting older.

The people generally don’t seem all that interested in the political situation, aside from the true believers, and there are of course several true believers. Everyone else is just mainly concerned about living their life. And that means making due with what you got. I’ve never seen a group of people who have provided better proof of the adage that necessity is the mother of all invention. The Cubans haven’t met a broken-down, rusted-out, junked piece of anything that they couldn’t get back to a “working” stage with a little hard work. And no, they don’t even have duct-tape to use to hold their crap together.