Cuba, Where "Merchant" Is A Dirty Word

Yoani Sanchez Award-winning Cuban blogger



Cuba: Where "Merchant" Is A Dirty Word

Posted: 09/22/2013 6:10 pm



If reality could personify itself, climb into a body, have physical

contours. If a society could be represented by a living being, ours

would be a growing adolescent. Someone who will stretch out his arms and

legs and throw off paternalism to become an adult. But that beardless

boy is wearing clothes so tight they hardly let him breathe. Our daily

life has been compressed by the corset of a legality with excessive

prohibitions and by an ideology as outdated as it is dysfunctional. This

is how I would draw the Cuba of today, this pubescent but repressed form

would represent the context I live in.



The governmental trend is not moving to recognize our needs for economic

and political expansion. Rather it is trying try to squeeze us into

absurd molds. This is the case with the limited occupations allowed to

self-employed workers, the sector that in any other country would be

classified as "private." Instead of expanding the number of licenses to

included many other productive activities and services, the authorities

are trying to cut reality to fit within the accepted list. The law

doesn't work to encourage creativity and talent, but rather to constrain

the limits of entrepreneurship.



The latest example of this contradiction is seen in the operations

against those who sell imported clothes, primarily from Ecuador and

Panama. According to the official media, many of these merchants are

licensed as "Tailors," which allows them to market articles coming from

their own sewing machines; and instead they offer industrially

manufactured blouses, pants and bags. Violators are punished by

confiscation of their merchandise plus heavy fines. The inspectors

attempt, in this way, to force our reality into the straitjacket

regulated by the Official Gazette.



Why, instead of so much persecution, don't they authorize the work of

"merchant." Buying, transporting and reselling articles in high-demand

should not be a crime, but rather a regulated activity that also

contributes to the treasury through taxes. To deny this key piece in the

machinery of any society is to misunderstand how to structure its

economic fabric. The legal framework of a nation shouldn't condemn it to

the infancy of timbiriches -- tiny Mom-and-Pop stands -- and to the

manufacture and sale of churros, but rather it should help us expand

professionally and materially. As long as the Cuban government doesn't

accept the ABCs of development, our reality must grow and stretch its

arms towards illegalities and the underground market.



Source: "Cuba: Where "Merchant" Is A Dirty Word | Yoani Sanchez" -

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yoani-sanchez/cuba-where-merchant-is-a_b_3972984.html?utm_hp_ref=world&ir=World