¿Sí, se puede?

After yesterday's post about soaring food prices at my local supermarket, I remembered a recent blog post from Generation Y.

(Generation Y is the blog of Yoani Sanchez, a Cuban philologist. Despite intense government censhorship, Sanchez continues publishing her blog by e-mailing posts to friends outside Cuba. Last year Time magazine described 34-year old Sanchez as "One of the 100 most influential people in the world.")

[translated from Spanish]

Celebration and mincemeat

January 23, 2009 Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y

To mark the half century since the first of January 1959, we Cubans could buy, through the ration system, half a pound of ground beef. The sense of humor that frequently saves us from neurosis did not spare the unexpected delicacy which was baptized as “the picadillo sent by Chavez,” an allusion to the obvious economic shoring-up that comes from Venezuela.

Although it seems a frivolity, for many Cubans the sale of that beef was the most significant event that happened lately.

I try to steer clear of politics here at The Blue Book, to focus instead on the Gospel. So I won't launch into a tirade here about Castro's failures or the tyranny of Communism ... though if I ever started writing about religious oppression in Cuba, there's surely enough material there to fill up my hard drive.

Folks, Cuba's just not that far away: Havana is as far from Atlanta as Atlanta is from New York City ... and the entire American South lies within a thousand miles of the Cuban capital. Which means that for Southerners, Havana is closer than 1/3 of the continental United States ... more than everything west of the Rockies.

Pero una qué diferencia triste ... but what a sad difference.

According to Cuban government estimates, the country has just 3 telephone lines per 100 people (the US has 68). Cuba has 23 automobiles per 1000 people (the US has 478) ... and Cuba has one computer per 100 people.  With a population of 11.5 million people, Cuban has just one ISP providing internet access: only 40,000 folks in Cuba can log onto the web.

Compare that to 76 computers per 100 people here in the US and 122 per hundred people in Israel.

But let's get back to the beef: in Cuba, there's practically none available. Ninguno. Can you imagine your family having the luxury of ground beef just two or three times a year?

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We've been blessed for so many years in this country that it's easy to forget what day to day life is like for other people, and become inwardly focused upon our own inconvenience.

Perhaps experiencing a little hunger ... the chronic kind ... and realizing how truly pervasive food shortages are beyond our shores, would tone-down some of our griping about the economy and the "hard times" we're enduring.

And help us understand how fortunate we really are.