These misguided folks…(I)
By
Alina Perera Robbio, Yailin Orta Rivera, Sara Cotarelo Prieto, Nelly
Osorio Llanes, Elayna L. Espina Sierra, and Luis Raúl Vázquez Muñoz In a place in Havana, one that’s like so many others, with nondescript and standardized fixtures, a place where they sell beer and something to eat, the man makes his entrance at the head of his posse. He is a bit overweight, and the thickness of his neck is emphasized by the glitter of the gold chains that drape it. His entry might go unnoticed except for his loud voice and the arrogance with which he summons a waiter. The posse acts like it was born to be in charge. One member plays with his bright-colored cell phone; and next to him two young girls burst out in incomprehensible guffaws, as if the world has no right to judge them. “We own the city,” they seem to shout. Someone who came into the place looking for a little peace, and maybe spending money saved up over the week or the month, would feel irritation, disrespect, and even a certain sadness. In another scene in the capital, a young woman attracts the attention of passers-by as she gets out of her exquisitely painted 1950s car, which some obsessive mechanic has restored like new despite the passage of time. She is pretty, and dressed fashionably. The scene would look innocent, just a curiosity, a felicitous sign of good fortune except for the very loud and crude way the girl is talking on her cell phone, her frenzied gum-chewing, and the demeaning looks she shoots at any regular and sensible folks passing by. She and the man from the cafe swell the ranks of the army of “exhibitionists,” and “believers,” (those who believe in things that perhaps don’t exist), names bestowed on them in good Cuban lingo by popular parlance. Their traits are manifested in many ways and seem to be part of a phenomenon – ostentation – that in recent years appears to have become more widespread. These people, who are determined to show off some form of power, raise a number of questions: Are we ostentatious by nature? Is this type of behavior especially characteristic of a particular era or generation? What are their motivations and their counterpoint? Inspired by a subject that seemed inoffensive, we covered the entire island to get responses. And we discovered that not only do these questions stir up the passions that are such a part of our island nature, they also touch on the most unsuspected veins of present-day Cuban society. “It is a complicated matter,” commented Harorl Bertot, a 21-year-old first year student of Law at the University of Havana. Bertot thinks the phenomenon has increased since the period of crisis Cuba went through with the disappearance of the socialist camp. “It has to do with a deterioration in values, which is not to say that these values no longer exist.” “In past years you saw more decency, but now, sadly, some young people are fetishists and want to follow the consumer patterns of other countries. It’s not that they can actually do it, but they make a pretense using objects. In our society, recent conditions have led to some people having more than others. Therefore, having something allows you to use it, but we need to see how it is used, so that it does not infect society negatively, in a way that causes damage.” For Anisleidys Soler Adan, a 19-year-old second year Law student at the University of Havana, “in recent years ostentation, which is a way of behaving, has become more prominent. You see this phenomenon just as much among those who do not have many material resources as among those who do have things. I always criticize a boy who has a car and drives strangely so everyone will look at him, or someone who wears a lot of chains or jewelry. “I don’t have a problem with what people have. Someone who has a car should enjoy it and avoid the hassles of taking buses. And if I have a nice, pretty blouse, I ought to enjoy it. But I should not feel that having it makes me better than others. The most important thing is that people take stock of themselves and think about this, because there is no mathematical formula to resolve things that come from within.” The genius Albert Einstein springs to mind when University of Havana third year cybernetics student Lorenzo Cancanon Rodriguez talks about ostentation: “What I study is complicated and time consuming. So I can’t be bothered spending a lot of time thinking about what I should wear to look good when I’m walking around. I am always reminded of Einstein, who owned identical suits so that he didn’t have to bother deciding what he was going to wear the next day.” Lorenzo feels that ostentation occurs when someone “tries to outshine others, to stand out from them, to feel superior. I believe that this phenomenon can effect everyone, although you see it more among people with less education, who are less able to distinguish what is real and what is not real in the avalanche of information reaching us through so many conduits in this globalized world.” In the view of Abdel Garcia Mola, a 21 year-old third year cybernetics student who hails from Bayamo in Granma province, sometimes you can make “the mistake of saying that a person is showing off just because he looks fashionable. The key thing is how someone feels at the time they are making a display of something. Some people do it because they have to and because it is important to be appropriately dressed, but there are those who want to show off. I think that we see this in every province in the country, but the phenomenon takes a more exaggerated form in the capital.” Some feel it goes beyond just appearances. Rancel Cardoso Carreno, a 20 year old from Pinar del Rio and a first year student in cybernetics, thinks “Exhibitionists are people who want more than they can get, and you can pick them out by how they speak and boast, by the places where they like to hang out, and even by how they relate to other people. The exhibitionists swagger with everyone.” Others have taken a sharper tone, even referring to a “layer of nouveau riches” – people more interested in being noticed than being noteworthy –- who worship chains, rings, and gold teeth, loud music blasting in the car and shiny geegaws, and, if they are men, pretty and “plastic” girls, the type of girls who were the model for Panamanian songwriter Ruben Blades (“The Plastic Girls”), or Spanish composer Joaquin Sabina’s “Barby Super Star.” Reasoned consideration Dr. Dionisio Zaldivar Perez, vice rector of the University of Havana and associate professor in the Psychology Department, maintains that ostentation “is expressed in the behavior of some people who believe that possessing a thing gives them greater value as human beings. We could say that their attitude is: ‘I have what you don’t have, and therefore I have greater value than you.’ “In more down-to-earth language, ostentation could be defined as showing off or boasting about something specific, in order to feel that you are on a higher rung of the social ladder.” Q. What leads to adopting this attitude? A. “In my opinion, those who behave ostentatiously mix up the meaning of life, confusing the means with the end. Material things are a means, but the final result has to be higher. The goal of life is not to have or to accumulate. Having this or that thing does not make us successful people.” Q. How is this phenomenon related to how the individual’s personality has been shaped? A. “The shaping of an individual’s personality is very closely linked to the educational process. Today parents have less and less time to devote to their children, perhaps because of job demands, because of the stresses of these times. So school, groups, and the mass media take over almost every aspect of influencing the budding human being. “In this analysis we should not lose sight of the phenomenon of globalization that is such an integral part of modern life. Every day we are subjected to more intense and subtle messages favoring the pursuit of profit, which encourages an untrammeled eagerness for material things. Throughout the world, advertising prioritizes consumption patterns; it says or suggests that a person’s value is based on the type of watch or suit one has.” Q. What, in your opinion, are the most common or visible expressions of ostentation in our society? A. “Those who show off want to emphasize differences. We see this, for example, in people who turn their daughters’ fifteenth birthday coming-of-age parties into astonishing affairs, or in those who wear their strings of gold chains with their shirts open so everyone can see. There are even those who use obesity to show how well off they are. Those who want to display their financial level can do so in a variety of ways.” Q. Is this a phenomenon linked to this specific time or is it something that will always be with us? Might it be an integral part of our identity? A. “Cubans are happy, friendly, and like to share what they have. I think that we really saw the phenomenon of ostentation after the economic crisis following the fall of the Berlin Wall. For many people socialism represented an ideal of life based on specific values. When it fell, many concepts went into free fall and selfishness and even “every man for himself” came to the fore. “The weight of a globalized world, and a different, more complex, national situation began to press down on us. The philosophy of consumerism was trying to worm its way in and looking to make itself at home.” Regarding this last question, Maria Isabel Dominguez, Doctor of Sociology and director of the Center for Psychological and Sociological Research (CIPS) of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba, had this to say: “I believe that in every epoch since differences of whatever type emerged in society, this phenomenon that can be called ostentation has existed, which is the desire to show someone else what you have, or what you might not have but pretend you have. “Ostentation is, to my mind, showing off something that is felt to bestow prestige and status, and to mark the person doing the showing off as belonging to a specific level of social status. Throughout history, people have made extravagant displays. There were the French courts of the Eighteenth Century, hiding the decadence of a system behind the trappings of splendor. “And the process of transition from feudalism to capitalism is also illustrative. In the course of that transition we saw the emergence of the union between the nascent bourgeoisie and the families of the nobility, many of which had nothing left but their titles, their noble status, their lineage, and their tradition. This was an alliance between the so-called nouveau riches – who had the money but not the necessary culture or traditions -- and the families that had illustrious surnames. It was a union in which each brought what they had in order to establish or maintain themselves in a given social status. “So we are not talking about something new, but rather about a phenomenon common to societies marked by differences. Every epoch has its ways of expressing this ostentation.” Q. How does this phenomenon manifest itself in present Cuban society? A. “If we are going to talk about the present we have to first look back a bit into the past. Cuba was said to be the most European of the Caribbean nations. During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, the intelligentsia was educated in Europe, in France. In that period there was a taste for whatever was thought to be the best in the world. And we can even see this spirit in the architecture that we marvel over today: Italian marble, fine crystals, a certain sumptuousness in the styles, which aspired toward the grandiloquent. This is something that was present in the genesis of our identity, for good and for bad, and that also enabled us to identify with the most progressive elements of European thought in that epoch. “In the first half of the Twentieth Century, the reference point was U.S. culture, which in its own way was imitating the patterns of old Europe. There were successive waves of colonial influence in which our island’s upper classes sought to base themselves on the model to our north, while the poorer strata took their lead from the wealthier groups. “By democratizing social relations, the Revolution led to changes that had great impact on the national identity. In general terms, the positive aspect was seen in how common people functioned. Negative traits were viewed as vestiges of the past. There was a dramatic shift in how people behaved, which does not mean that people didn’t show off about other things. Being a university-trained professional was viewed as something positive, and some were boastful about that too, as were some about their specific responsibilities. “Later, especially with the onset of the economic crisis of the 1990s, and with the growth of societal differences, the phenomenon of ostentation shifted toward demonstrating power through possession of material goods. It began to be expressed around physical appearance and, along with that, the type of clothing worn. Other material elements like housing, and other possessions that express the philosophy of the nouveau riche mimicker of foreign life styles, also came into play. Then other social groups who did not have access to high living standards copied the patterns of the domestic social groups who were better off. We can see the influence of the communications media, i.e. television, videos, serials, novelas, and magazines coming from other parts of the world in this process. “In this way the image of an ideal and appropriate life style takes root, but it is a life style that flows out of a very different economic context. And if the specific conditions to reproduce that life style don’t exist, they try to pretend that these conditions do exist. Are we or aren’t we? In a poll that the Social Investigations Team of our newspaper carried out among some one hundred people ranging between 18 and 61 years of age, respondents showed a tendency to agree that Cubans are ostentatious. “They like to be in the middle of things,” “they enjoy showing what they have and what they don’t,” “it is part of their make up,” “they show off about everything,” “it is a problem of social conduct” – these are the type of responses by those (some 64 percent of the survey), who asserted that we like to “flaunt ourselves” by showing some type of power. According to the study carried out in Havana between October 8 and 14, 2008, around 20 percent considered that this attitude is not inherent in those born on the island. Meanwhile, 6 percent declined to give a categorical response. Those who responded “no” felt that Cubans are simple and modest by nature; and that their socio-cultural upbringing allows them to look deeply into matters as an antidote to foolishness. Those sharing their opinions with Juventud Rebelde linked the phenomenon of ostentation to attitudes like “bragging,” “ excessively showing off something material or spiritual,” “standing out,” or “being vain.” The inquiry brought out that Cubans think people are ostentatious not only when they focus their lives around material things, but also when they send out strong signals about their preferences and possessions; “they strut around with their shiny jewelry;” “they make a spectacle pealing out in their cars, with loud music and horns;” or “they bring their sound systems outside so everyone can see them;” or “they make a show of talking on their cell phone in the most inappropriate places.” Some of those surveyed alluded to people who flaunt their positions of power in the work arena, or in personal relations, in the latter case by “always wanting the final word.” So Mr. Exhibitionist, where are you? It is curious that everyone talks about them. They are everywhere. They are objects of reproach and their characteristics are well-defined. But are their any people who admit to acting that way? We followed their trail, in hopes of getting an honest, first person statement. We searched among citizens wearing very flashy clothing; we moved among showy cars, exclusive stores and places teeming with business, centers you cannot enter unless you pay a stiff charge. And we also went to crowded plazas, to places totally lacking in glitter or comfort. And yet…the exhibitionist never turned up. No one ever said to us: “I am, and what of it?” This confirmed our certainty that being called an exhibitionist is not a title anyone wants for bear. And the most dangerous thing: it is a many-faceted attitude, which can take root in the smallest fields. The following musings from Dr. Maria Isabel Dominguez illustrate the idea that we can end up establishing the army of exhibitionists without being conscious of it. She feels that the phenomenon has grown in recent years: “In studies among young people, we asked about the criteria for success. They frequently associate success with those who have amassed material goods, or those who have had triumphs that allow them access to those goods. Many said this in a critical sense, saddened that this was the concept of success held by the majority, but none thought that this was their own perception of what it means to be successful.” Views “We are not exhibitionists,” Maria de los Angeles Salcedo Perez, deputy administrator of Technical Development and Services at the Ministry of Agriculture in Ciego de Avila, told this newspaper. Her opinion is that “we are simple, natural, open, very sincere, generous. We see this in patterns of conversation, in our interactions with neighbors and coworkers.” But, she concedes, “a percentage of Cubans like to show off, and this phenomenon has grown in recent years with the appearance of the two currencies in circulation and the material differences that have appeared in society. “One sees especially strong elements of exhibitionism in people connected with the world of business and illegal activities, or people not connected to labor. There are people who are very anxious to show off a material status above the Cuban average. This gives great pain to those who work.” Maria de los Angeles would make a distinction between “what might be a style, and exhibitionistic posturing. The fact that a woman walks around with a necklace, or a man with a good watch, does not mean that they are exhibitionists. You can spot that type of person by their deep-seated desire to show off.” This Cuban is especially concerned about young people, who are “so vulnerable, so prone to be corrupted by the frivolousness and vanity intrinsic to the exhibitionist.” Also from Ciego de Avila, Jesus Milian Rivero, director of the Plant Health laboratory of the Provincial Office of Agriculture, asserted that “exhibitionism is found in the Cuban population, although it is a minority.” He worries about the so-called “little dandies,” (“pepillitos”?) the people who don’t work, those “for whom money falls from the sky and who strut around decked out in chains, rings, and gold teeth.” In Jesus Milian’s opinion, the problem has always existed: “This type of person has always been here, been present, and one sees him in his own context. When someone gets a ‘bundle,’ (”tierrita”) as we say about money, he ends up strutting around trying to show off that he has more than others. This has become more acute in the present period. Before it was not so visible. People had possibilities and it was even seen as bad for someone to show off like that.” The phenomenon is not restricted to a single social group. It is not simply a feature of the lazy or of those who fill their pockets just by snapping their fingers. This view was volunteered by Juan Carlos Gonzalez Rodriguez, Communications Specialist in the Ciego de Avila Branch of the Agriculture Ministry: “I don’t think that showing off is a problem that pertains just to people who don’t have a connection to work, or are somehow involved in illegalities. Sometimes you see a professional, someone with a certain social status who is not some delinquent, and who nonetheless struts around showing the world that he has more than other people. I don’t believe that ostentation is just a problem of kids who go around decked out in chains and designer clothing. It is a problem you also see in well-educated adults.” The subject of this report provoked various thoughts in Risquiel Garcia Martinez, mid-level technician in the Municipal Land and Tractor Center of the municipality of Baragua, in Ciego de Avila. It prompted this passionate monologue: “I don’t think that the Cuban is a show off. This exhibitionism began to be seen with the collapse of the socialist camp and all the problems of the economy that we have now. Before that you hardly saw it. What were you going to show off about? Everyone could go to the store and use their money to buy an air conditioner, a television, or a refrigerator. “When I was a boy, my father bought a Krim television set and an ‘AC’ [air conditioner] for the house. He did it without problems, on installments. We have always been modest people. Things changed with the special period. That’s where we started seeing ostentation. Some very ‘cool’ people studied with me and we did our military service together, and now they pass right by you without even a greeting. You look at them and ask yourself: ‘Buddy, what’s with that?’” “Look, it is not just about young people: there are old folks who are big show-offs. I think that the problem can affect all of us, including professionals. Some lawyers who have gone to work in tourism have over time turned into tremendous exhibitionists. They don’t greet anyone; they pass you by and don’t look at you. They are misguided folks. “Money in and of itself corrupts, that is the truth. And the show-off is a conceited type who wants to show that he is best. At the airports you find a little Cuban who is an exhibitionist to the max. They get off the plane loaded down with trinkets, they rent a car and drive around with tires screaming, making everyone crazy. Those are the exhibitionists.” When we put this contentious and complex matter to the Cuban philosopher Enrique Ubieta Gomez, the discussion took off in a number of directions. While the ideas that ran through the conversation don’t provide the final say on the matter, they do supply us with some guidelines that ought not to be ignored: It is inevitable, he emphasized during the exchange, that our population has more and more interaction with the system that encourages the values of capitalism. This requires that we build effective cultural strategies to bolster socialist values, i.e., values free from selfishness and superficiality, but that are also not based on long and tiresome explanations of how our existences must be based on self-sacrifice. Socialism must be seen as a qualitatively new relationship between the individual and the collective, in which the spiritual satisfaction of ever richer and more diverse individuals does not contradict, but rather confirms, the collective interest. Is this an aspiration that can develop under conditions of economic blockade, underdevelopment, and besiegement by the mass media? The interchange with the philosopher certainly reminds us that the challenges to Cuban socialism in the decades to come will not be simply economic, but also, and especially, political, meaning cultural. |
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