NEW YORK _ This may have been one of the warmest winters in the history of this city, but recently, icy wind blasted down the streets. No matter how much you have on _ t-shirt, shirt, sweater, coat, scarf, boots, cap and gloves _ the wind chill numbs your nose, your jaw and stings your eyes. Every thought ceases, as you try to carry out your brains' survival commands: bundle up, find a warm place.
In winter, life in New York's streets is hell. Nonetheless, they are filled with immigrants who came from warmer places: countries that are closer to the midsection of planet Earth.
There is the driver from the Dominican Republic, the construction worker from Mexico, the messenger from Ecuador, the Peruvian woman who manages the parking lot, the Colombian woman who sells hot dogs or umbrellas on the sidewalk. All wrapped up in layers of clothing and their immigration problems. All missing their moms and dads, girlfriends, homes, the beach, the hills, and the corner they turned and left behind. All of them freezing to death.
What are they doing here? Why don't they go back to their native countries?
First, the obvious. Money. There are jobs here, not there. What they earn in a long, full day there, they make in an hour here. Besides, someone who supports a family here also has one or two more families to support there. That is the reason _ the only reason _ that the crossing, the loneliness, the cold are endurable and worthwhile.
A strong connection between effort and results is the norm here. If you work really hard, you generally do well. It is a fact. I've seen Latin-American peasants buying their own homes, and tortilla-makers and garbage collectors turn into millionaires.
In the United States, in spite of its wars and ghosts, people can reinvent themselves.
Here, I know many more people who have succeeded than any who have failed. It is success by its simplest definition: a safe place to live, a decent job, schooling for the children and health care. The people arriving in New York have made it their home, with all its aromas and flavors: Puebla York, Santo York, Quito York, Lima York.
I know, on the other hand, people who work far longer than eight hours a day in San Salvador, Guatemala, Oaxaca, and Medellin who will die inexorably poor. There, a connection between effort and results doesn't exist. Just imagine how a graduate _ fresh out of high school or university in the state of Chiapas or Veracruz in Mexico _ looks at the future and realizes the government cannot possibly create 1.3 million jobs a year to provide employment for him and his classmates.
Latin America has the highest level of inequality in the world. Distorted asset distribution gives the richest 10 percent almost half of the total income of the country. That is why Latin America treads on two paths at the same time: creating the richest people and multiplying the poor.
The region is still made up of monopolies and oligopolies, and the few who share the pie among themselves. And as long as the feast isn't open to everyone, people will keep going north. Our best workers are our main export product. And for a young Latin American, it is frustrating to know there are still class and race barriers that not even the best education can erase.
Return to that? Of course not. Hence, very few return.
Not even Cuban exiles are likely to flock to Cuba after Fidel Castro dies. People live better in Hartford, Atlanta and Miami than in Havana, Santiago and Holguin. They will return, perhaps, to visit as tourists, or even to invest in an ocean-view condominium in Havana or Varadero. But not to live there.
Several years ago, Cuban author and columnist Carlos Alberto Montaner said he believed that less than 5 percent of exiled Cubans would return to a democratic Cuba. And as far as I know, he has not changed his prognosis.
Rather, it would be the other way around.
People, naturally, would prefer to live in an established society, already built, than in one that is under construction. This was pointed out by professor Jaime Suchlicki, at Miami University, who until recently warned of a possible deluge of Cubans coming from the island after the dictator's death. Who wants to wait five or 10 years for power outages to end and for supermarkets that cater to everybody to open?
The same goes for the Latin American immigrants who work on the streets of New York. The difference with the Cubans on the island, however, is that these people have already left their homelands.
They did not believe the politicians who promised governments free of corruption and favoritism. They didn't have time to wait for better teachers in public schools. They could not risk their children being abducted by a drug trafficker or their two weeks' paycheck being snatched at gunpoint in front of a patrol car. They did not buy the nonsense that television told them. They did not stay there waiting for a pay raise that never came, or the job that never materialized. They placed their bet on the present, not the future.
That is why they left in the first place, and why they won't go back. Even if they freeze to death on the streets of New York. I am sure of this. I only came for a year, and already 24 years have come and gone right here.