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.
when your kids get older, they don't move out, there's literally nowhere for them to move to. nothing is built, nothing is for sale, and you have no money anyway. you put up paper walls, pretend not to hear each other.
the thing you smuggle into Cuba when you're visiting family isn't expensive stuff, the most precious items are USB drives with movie rips and video game roms, and $5 tins of Cafe Pilon
'cause Cuba exports any good coffee it makes, and leaves locals to drink stuff so bad that the $5 tin feels truly luxurious.
when I was visiting my great aunt, one of her neighbors came in and made himself a cup of coffee. he didn't know it was fresh from the tin we brought over; it had been transferred over to their usual container.
saw a grown man well up with apologetic tears in his eyes because as soon as his lips touched the drink, he knew this was different. he drank his neighbor's Cafe Pilon thinking it was just the usual crap and he almost cried. Because he felt he had taken something incredibly precious of his neighbor's without asking.
anyway, my point is: you don't really need to try out repossessing people's private property in New York. there's an island 90 miles off Florida where incredibly smart people, I sincerely mean that, have been doing it for three-quarters of a century.
π¨πΊπΈ NYC MAYOR MAMDANI'S HOUSING OFFICIAL: "YOUR HOME SHOULDNβT REALLY BE YOURS"
According to Cea Weaver, a top housing advisor for NYC Mayor Mamdani, the idea of owning your home the way people always have is outdated.
She says weβve treated property as something personal for βcenturies,β and now itβs time to see it as βcollective.β
Her words? Families (especially white ones, of course) need a βdifferent relationship to property.β
In other words: stop thinking of your house as yours, and start thinking of it as something shared.
This isnβt a fringe activist on TikTok. This is a person in charge of housing policy for New York City.
Heads up: this "shared equity" talk is a nice way of saying ownership might not mean what you think it does anymore.
Source:
@EndWokeness