I’ll admit I’m a sucker for a good farmers market, and I must confess that part of that is because it’s aesthetically pleasing. It’s a lovely sight to see people lined up outdoors selling the food they worked hard to grow and make, no packaging or preservatives in sight. Piles of colorful, ripe fruit next to perfectly green vegetables, buckets of cut flowers, and meat so vividly red and marbled you almost never see it like that in grocery stores — what’s not to like?
I’ve also seen dozens of farmers markets in Costa Rica, and I can attest that they are the norm, not the exception. In the United States, going to the market is typically a fun, trendy Saturday activity. In Costa Rica, it’s where many people buy their groceries every day, year-round. Prices are cheap, and the food is fresh. You can purchase almost everything you need to cook a delicious meal in one stop.
For some people, however, the experience can be overwhelming.
There’s a young woman named Anita who has a fairly decent social media following. She lives in Cuba and documents what it’s like to live under the Communist regime in a county that’s literally falling apart as we speak. Last week, she and her partner and their young child fled the country, flying to Nicaragua and then making their way to Costa Rica by foot, bus, and car to San José, where they will now have the ability to live better lives. As a humanitarian gesture, Costa Rica currently offers various temporary protections for Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans.
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Anita has documented the journey as best she can. The flight was the easy part, but getting to Costa Ria left her family caked in mud, exhausted, and throwing up. “I felt terrible, I don’t know why, but there are so many hills in these parts, so the journey was really difficult for me,” she said.
But she also says it was all worth it to create a better future for her family. “Thank God we’re here now and we’re enjoying what Christmas is really like, and I’m so grateful that Costa Rica has opened its doors to me, because it truly is an incredible country,” she said.
But what really stood out about her journey — that even made the newspaper in Costa Rica — was her reaction to the first farmers market that she saw. She called it a hard “shock to reality” and said she was so excited, like a child, because she’d never seen much food in one place in her lifetime. Let that sink in.
I can’t explain to you what it feels like to come to a market and see such a variety of fruits, vegetables, meats, everything… Here you can buy whatever you need. People come here and buy what they’ll need for the whole week. The truth is, I don’t understand why my country, Cuba, goes through so much, when everywhere else in the world people have the right and can buy the basic necessities they need to live.
The mere sight of strawberries made her “go crazy” she said, as they’re one of her favorite foods, but you can’t get them in Cuba. She was also amazed that she could buy plants for her home. She filmed a video, but I can’t seem to embed it, so you can watch it here.
Anita follows up that video with more videos of her cooking her first Christmas meal in Costa Rica, saying that it was more than she could ever imagine. “Right now in Cuba, I would have been worried about what I was going to eat, what I could buy, how my money wouldn’t stretch far enough,” she said. “And yet here I had the opportunity to be in a free country where I can go out and buy as much meat as I want, buy a cake.”
While filming herself seasoning a large roast, she adds:
I don’t know if you know this, but Christmas isn’t celebrated in Cuba. Most people don’t even have enough money to buy a piece of meat or decorate their homes with lights.
Things are so incredibly different here that I invite you to appreciate it; you can’t imagine how happy people are in this country, and they haven’t even realized it.
Today, I’m only thinking about my family, about how many people didn’t even have a plate of food to eat, how they spent Christmas without electricity, without water, without motivation, and without hope.
“It’s sad, it’s true, but I also feel incredibly proud because I got my family out of that hell we were living in,” she concludes. “I hope that one day all Cubans can truly know what Christmas is like to celebrate.”
I don’t have a lot more to say — this is just part of my continuing effort to point out what communism leads to. I’m not sure how old this woman is, maybe in her twenties or early thirties, and when she said she’d never seen that much food in once place or that she couldn’t believe people could actually go to the store and buy enough groceries for the week, I felt like everyone in the world needed to hear this story, especially those in our country who are currently voting for the types of policies that led to this situation.
From what I could tell about her, Anita is a hard worker. She’s also brave. She calls out her “government” on a public platform when doing such a thing can land you in prison. And that journey from Nicaragua to Costa Rica isn’t an easy one, especially this time of year when rainy season is coming to an end and when you have no car. But she was willing to risk it to escape the place that many leftists in our country consider a paradise, just to experience freedom. God bless her.
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