“That currency exchange in the middle of the pandemic… that was terrible. I agree that nowhere did they want to take the CUC, and it went down. The CUC that was at 24 pesos in this transit time dropped to 21 pesos. Imagine, that was amazing. And later, coupled with that, foreign currencies rose so much there, man... that today any pair of shoes you want to buy, the one with the least quality, costs you 8,000 or 5,000 pesos [between double and three times the minimum wage], it is somewhat difficult. I tell you, look, I don't know what an MLC store is like, I don't even know what it's like inside and I've tried not to go there so as not to get depressed to tell you. I don't know what benefits they open a store in a currency that doesn't circulate as such, that is... [in the currency with which] I as a worker don't get paid... with a currency that doesn't pay me... I have to hope that some relative, some friend who lives in another country will send me this money, so that I can then practically live as a leech for this person.”
“At first, I thought that, I mean, I was scared. I was worried about my family. My grandmother has her age already... and I said: 'Damn, why do we have to go to face this disease? We don't know who is sick and who isn't.' Later I realized that it was... they told us that it was the duty that we had to fulfill, it was like our contribution to improve the situation. The first stage of that was terrible. It was getting up early every day, it was living in tension all the time, because you didn't know... you knocked on the door and even though you had all the protection, the hypochlorite and all those things, I never felt well protected, I had fear, it was something I did not know. I was always afraid, but imagine, that was what my evaluation depended on.” ['And that was voluntary or compulsory?'] “Well, brother, you know what is voluntary. I don't need to say it...” ['You need to say it because I don't know...'] “Let's see, we could not investigate, but they always told us that this is going to affect, that it would be evaluated. So you just did that. I took this time, I took the first stage of the investigation as my evaluation, as if I had to go to school.”– '¿Y eso era de forma voluntaria u obligatoria?'
Bueno, hermano, tú sabes qué es voluntario. No hace falta que lo diga...
– 'Hace falta que lo digas porque yo no sé...'
A ver, nosotros podíamos no pesquisar, pero siempre nos dijeron que esto va a afectar, que eso se evaluaría. Así que simplemente uno lo hacía eso. Yo tomé este tiempo, la primera etapa de la pesquisa la tomé como mi evaluación, como si tuviera que ir a la escuela.”
“That was something that came naturally to me, because I come from an artistic family. It was easy for me. And at one point I started working with a friend of mine in her salon, her name is Yunis Navarro and she lives in the United States. She was the one who instilled in me that I could use it to improve my own economy a little and help my mother and all that. And she loved it. I had a hard time, because many of my friends thought that because of me doing this job... I don't know... that I was homosexual or something like that. But later they realized that no, that does not influence. But at the beginning yes, at the beginning that was difficult. And I didn't do it for that reason, because I felt sorry that people were going to say something, but my economic situation wasn't the best."
“At that time [of high school] I didn't have much – like most of us we don't have much… and I had a lot of work going on despite my mom making all that effort, and I was never underdressed or anything like that, but I knew it was thanks to my mom's efforts. There were many children of mom and dad, many well-off children. But in the end that never made me feel so bad, because when you're going to see... from the academic point of view I was always very good and that was something that lifted me up, because although I couldn't have the best shoes or the best clothes, anyway what made me feel good was that I did my things. Apart from the fact that I had the opportunity to escape for art, I didn't have such a bad time.”
Brian Nuñes Steinert was born on October 21, 1999 in the Guantánamo province located in the extreme east of the Caribbean island. His father is a plastic artist who now lives in Mexico. Before his departure from Cuba in 2006, he devoted a lot of attention to little Brian, with which he managed to teach him what he considered to be the basic things a man should know. Subsequently, Brian lived with his mother who works as a civil servant. From a young age he knew that he liked art a lot, something that he probably inherited from his father. He went through several secondary schools, some of which were more elite and others entirely village-like. He later opted for a Medicine career. At the same time, he got engaged in the work of a stylist. As a medical student, he had to participate in the investigation of Covid-19. This despite the fact that he didn‘t like him, because he feared that he might endanger his grandmother. He witnessed the demonstrations that broke out in July 2021 in practically the entire territory of Cuba and are considered the largest since the Maleconazo. He also belongs among the millions of Cubans hard hit by the consequences of the currency reform.
