Alone against abuse.
Muchos comercios niegan el derecho a los pagos digitales o lo usan a su conveniencia. Foto: Tomada de Cubadebate.
After shouting, boasting about her relatives in positions of power, making threats, and telling her to post it on Facebook if she wanted, the «shop assistant» buried her head in her phone, leaving the woman there alone with her monologue of demands, defending her right to digital payment.
«I already received the ten thousand pesos for today. I can’t accept any more transfers. I’m sorry, it’s the owner’s orders,» the saleswoman repeated, while the customer insisted on the absurdity of being prevented from making a transfer at that location on Milanés Street, where «everything is much more expensive than in other places,» the shopper pointed out.
I’ve witnessed or been part of this scene countless times, just like any other resident of La Matanza in their role as a consumer. There’s no way, absolutely none, that banking will ever become a natural phenomenon, without drama, without struggles, without frustrations.
I won’t mention here the already memorable tricks used by vendors, both state-run and private, to deny customers this legally guaranteed right. Nor will I refer to the arguments put forward by private actors regarding their need for cash to restock, given the banking system’s inability to provide it.
In the act of purchasing, there is something more worrying than the mere impossibility of accessing products or services. It is the blatant disregard for Cuban law, the ignorance of laws, decrees, and resolutions. A total anarchy that puts the Cuban state and its institutions in checkmate. Without enforcement, the law is meaningless.
And since all of this fails, consumers go from the privilege of always being right to losing it completely in an unequal confrontation against «merchants» eager to demonstrate their superiority in times when they seem to care little about what access to food means—a couple of pounds of chicken, ground meat, sugar, or rice.
Consumers are defenseless, alone, facing the affront of «we don’t accept transfers,» when food or medicine can determine people’s lives. Sporadic actions and weeks of confrontations are useless in the face of this.
There they are, as tacit evidence of the violations: the same vendors who commit them, the same kiosks, the same cart drivers, in the same places, in plain sight, sad proof that the established system doesn’t work, or only works partially.
As long as the law continues to be disregarded, consumers will remain alone in the face of abuse. Alone and sick with the virus of disrespect for their rights.
In this almost daily battle between vendors and customers that is happening in Cuba today, there is a lack of an arbiter, that necessary protection to ensure that digital money is worth what the Cuban state promised.
Written by Eva Luna Acosta Armiñán.
