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In Romania, Life Is Coming Up Oranges

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Romanians lined up by the hundreds Thursday to buy meat and other foods that had been unavailable to the public for years as Romania’s warehouses began sending produce to retail stores. Some children tasted oranges and bananas for the first time in their lives.

In a country where normal life has been depressed for a generation, Romanians joked among themselves that they were “returning to the abnormal” Thursday, delighted that they were able to buy real coffee--instead of the usual ersatz mix--for normal prices. A kilogram of coffee, at black-market prices, usually costs 1,500 Romanian lei, equivalent to one-third the average monthly salary.

Five days after the bloody revolution that ended the 24-year reign of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, the shooting had all but stopped and the streets were crowded with people. The government said 90% of the factories and other workplaces were functioning normally.

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“I never thought I would live in such a time,” said Margarit Mihaela, 20, a university student who stood with a crowd of Romanians watching with eager amazement as packages of pork tenderloin were unloaded from a truck and carried into a meat market in the center of the city.

“Everyone is happy,” Mihaela said. “Everyone is laughing. There are smiles all over the streets. You know, I have never talked to a foreign man before. It was not allowed. And all this food, we never saw. It was all sent out of the country. It was not for us.

“I have seen children trying to eat oranges like they eat apples, without peeling them,” she continued. “They had never seen an orange before. They didn’t know how to eat one. I myself have not had an orange in three years.”

Foodstuffs such as coffee and imported fruit never got to ordinary consumers in Romania under the Ceausescu regime. Such luxuries were reserved for the privileged members of the Ceausescu Establishment, ranking Communist figures and the state security apparatus. Most of the country’s rich agricultural produce was sent out of the country to help retire Romania’s foreign debt.

Ceausescu launched the breakneck drive to pay off the $11-billion foreign debt in 1982 and paid off the last of it in April. But there was no sign that the Draconian austerity he imposed on 23 million Romanian citizens had eased when the last payments were made.

The meat coming off the trucks in Bucharest on Thursday was neatly packed in white boxes and identified in five languages, none of them Romanian.

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Among the first decrees of the new National Salvation Front Council was to revoke the bogus “scientific” plan under which Ceausescu imposed a bizarre low-calorie diet on his people. Not many were disposed to follow it, but for millions of urban residents in Romania, the simple lack of food in the stores effectively enforced it.

Bucharest residents said Ceausescu’s energy conservation measures also have been lifted and that their apartments are now heated to almost normal levels. For the last six winters, Romanians have lived in rooms heated no higher than 50 degrees--and often lower. Romanians say that on the coldest nights of recent winters, they’ve had to sleep with their coats on.

“I don’t want to remember this anymore,” Mihaela said. “We will have a New Year’s without the ‘Hero.’ We don’t want any more ‘heroes’ here. I want to live now. I want to listen to American music. I want to see American movies.”

Amid all the smiles and general pleasure, there were also emotions of gratitude and sorrow.

“Very many people died,” said Anna Vrenchanu, 22, another student. “We don’t know the numbers, but there were many.”

Mihaela said 26 students in her college at the university were killed last Thursday night. She had helped to carry the dead and wounded from the university square after they were attacked by the Securitate, Ceausescu’s elite paramilitary security unit.

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“It was a children’s revolution,” said an elderly woman who broke into the street-corner discussion.

“Yes, the students,” Mihaela said.

“No, no, not students,” the woman said. “The children. Our children saved us. They did this for us.”

Roxanna Boban, a physician, said special credit should also be given to Radio Free Europe.

“Radio Free Europe, and also the Voice of America and the BBC--these were very important to us,” she said. “Everyone in the country knew about Timisoara from the radio,” she said, referring to the demonstration and the shooting of protesters that launched the rebellion in the western Transylvanian city Dec. 17.

“The radio told us what was going on. We could learn nothing from our own radio or television or the newspapers. This was very important, and no one ever mentions it.”

Other Romanians agreed that the radio was important in keeping Romanians abreast of the changes that swept through Eastern Europe this year. The Ceausescu regime could keep the news out of its own newspapers and radio and television reports, but even Radio Moscow, beaming to Romania, spread the news of a non-Communist government in Poland, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the fall of Communist governments in East Germany and Czechoslovakia.

The new government said that members of the Securitate continued to give themselves up Thursday, but gave no numbers.

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Sporadic shooting was reported in the northern section of the city, in the vicinity of the television broadcasting station, but the rest of the capital was calm Thursday.

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