my grandmother was an educator, started a private school in Havana in the 50s and worked as the principal taught some English classes at night for adults as well so obviously Castro's goons took possession of the school after 1959 which to have your dream that you built from nothing taken from you and given to complete idiots who burn it down in short order is one thing but the most humiliating aspect of the whole ordeal that my grandmother would talk about was more specific than that it was having men show up at her door, after everything was done, holding an inventory sheet that they found which listed how many desks she had bought for the school, blackboards, etc and being asked about a few desks they couldn't find. literally that. how come there's 48 desks in the school and not the 50 on the inventory sheet. of course the answer was that they broke and they threw them out. the inventory sheet was old. but they didn't believe her, they intimidated her at gunpoint. a little lady, a school principal who probably weighed 100 pounds. where are the fucking desks. she remembered that forever. it's almost 70 years later, and the situation is if anything only more absurd, more morally and economically bankrupt in Cuba if your fridge breaks, you wait until the government sends you a new one (on the seventh of never) and docks it from your govt pay accordingly. your govt pay is ~16 USD a month. you can make more by pestering some euro or canadian tourist to buy some random junk off you -- if you follow them around enough and are persuasive enough, they will give you a $20, which is more then your doctor makes in a month. which is sort of whatever, because there really are no stores, just ration counters with 5-6 things listed on a blackboard that they'll trade you for tickets. rice, sugar, salt, cigarettes. if you don't smoke you trade you trade your cigarette rations for something else. toilet paper. ...