By: Santiago Romero
Translater by: Guillermo Rodriguez
Look Out, Here Comes the Hawker!.- People still miss those timely vendors’ cries, not only because of their fine cheap offers, but because they were full of street wisdom and original phrases and single words that motivated a few song writers, troubadours and choirs of the nineteenth century as well.
Today, the creative street crier is conspicuously absent. Citizens long for his elegance when proposing his products, how he orderly placed them in appropriate baskets.
Now instead there is animal abuse, verbal violence, the imposition of high prices and deception as new signs that have fully erased those memorable town criers who populated the city of Santiago.
The contributions of yesterday street criers (pregonero in Spanish) were so many that they influenced music, dance, plastic arts, street theater, dance, poetry, narrative, politics and social communication studies in the communities. There used to be a Pregon Festival in Santiago de Cuba which does not longer exist here, but it survives with the support of other provincial and municipal governments in the western part of the country.
The difference is also marked by the commodity sales, a good part of them are illegal and in open defiance of government ordinances, for example, today you can find all kinds of medicines, domestic and foreign, for the newborn as well as the indispensable for the seriously ill in intensive care. In addition, products of high popular demand are included such as: «Hey, the ration card coffee… the grocery store coffee!», «Get your cooking oil, from the hard currency store here!», «There is export white rice!» or «I buy any little piece of gold or silver plated!»
Disobedience and corruption also have their masked or open proclamations «…and nothing happens, journalist.” Lola Vazquez, a woman in her eighties from the Versalles neighborhood, tells me precisely when -inconveniently- the stridency of an unknown young man with a dubious proclamation arises in the neighborhoods of Santiago: «There is bread, the one that fills you!», especially when for three days the one rationed by the card has not been sold. Suddenly, behind in clear defiance another shouts: «Take your dollar here, at only $380, a bargain!»
It happens that it is not necessary to investigate who are in the daily and very juicy illegality, because it is evident the inoperativeness of those responsible for the governments in many Santiago localities and the social impact that these «hawkers» have in the economic and financial lack of control, many times, are those who socialize the disorderly prices, mistakenly taken as referents for new state tariffs.
Miguel Matamoros and 98th anniversary of the founding of the famous Trío
Goodbye to those traditional cries to sell lemons, mangos, brooms or peanuts. On the contrary, anyone appears badly dressed and spoken with a can and a stick or piece of iron, blow after blow, without saying anything, to accentuate the onomatopoeic sound that takes for granted that peanuts are being sold.
The baker bursts in with the shuddering whistle at 2, 3, 4 and 5 in the morning «Come on, the one that fills you!», yes, it is true, it fills, but of illusions, because it is a little ball comparable to any table tennis ball and much smaller when you manage to fold it up to four times, but worth 25 pesos and sometimes up to thirty or more, if accompanied with an extremely thin slide of sausage or any kind of sauce.
Where did the legacies of those vendors end up? Most of them had a low school level, but very high in the assimilation of family teaching, respect, morals and all the civic education that forged a plethora of street vendors, who left their mark for today’s entrepreneurs.
