One may wait fifteen minutes to buy a pound of rice, or thirty minutes for a bus that never shows. Another may wait four days in a provincial terminal for an airplane that’s sitting in a hangar in some other province waiting for repairs from a mechanic who happens to be waiting in line at the doctor’s office, but the doctor is late, still waiting for a permission slip from a government functionary who’s behind schedule because she, too, had to wait in line all morning trying to reschedule her daughter for an eye exam that was delayed because the optometric lens was waiting to be repaired by the technician who was busy waiting at the train station for his relatives to arrive.
— Ben Corbett, This Is Cuba