EDITOR’S NOTE: Barry Ostrow is the retired director of university relations at Armstrong Atlantic State University. He is now a freelance writer and sometime-world traveler. His latest travels took him to Cuba with a people-to-people program in February.
We were sitting in the living room of one of Cuba’s many casas particulars (bed and breakfasts) listening to the owner explain how he had worked to obtain an expensive license to open his privately-owned establishment in Trinidad. As he finished, he went to the front door, opened it and led a horse from the cobblestone street into the room.
It seems he was something of a horse whisperer in addition to being on the front lines of private ownership. And business was good. Next door an addition to his three-bedroom B&B was under construction. Asked when it would be completed, he said with a shrug, “Who knows? This is Cuba.”
In Communist Cuba, almost everything is owned by the government. However, the country is experimenting with private ownership. A list of about 165 business categories has been established for which Cubans may apply — and pay high fees for — to operate as private businesses.
Progress is painfully slow and not always successful, but the doorway to capitalism has cracked just a bit.
One of the biggest expansion categories is the paladars, restaurants set up in private homes and mansions.
It’s hard to tell the state-run restaurants from the paladars. While both can be good dining experiences, the paladars in which we ate were uniformly excellent while the state-owned restaurants included some clunkers.
We experienced shortages from almost every menu — such as beef, fish, chicken and flan — in both types of eateries.
I was in a large, attractive souvenir shop on Plaza Mayor in Trinidad when I spied a carved seahorse I had not seen before in all the cookie-cutter shops run by the state. I mentioned to the owner that the carving was unique, and he explained, “I own my own shop, and I can buy merchandise from a wider range of suppliers than the state stores can.”
Along the plazas and narrow, winding side streets of Havana and Trinidad, hundreds of souvenir stands are set up on the cobblestones. A great many of these are also privately owned.
Sadly, the economic revolution only goes so far. A member of our group — we were on a U.S.-sanctioned “people to people” tour — relayed the story of a Cuban couple she had spent the previous evening with.
The couple had paid the large licensing fee to open a movie theater in their Havana neighborhood. When the theater became successful, the state took it away from them.
So, how does the average Cuban go about buying things?
This is a nation where nurses and doctors make only $35-$45 a month respectively. Many of them moonlight as hotel maids and taxi drivers where they can earn much more with tips than they can in their professions. Bartenders, tour guides, and tour bus drivers also make a lot through tips.
The average Cuban may get along on as little as $20 a month.
Some of this poverty is mitigated in the form of money being sent by relatives living in the United States. These remittances are the largest form of foreign capital flowing into the country and help drive the economy.
In other cases, their standard of living is boosted by gifts brought in from the states.
Awaiting our charter flight out of Miami, we could see lines of Cuban-Americans wheeling huge, blue plastic-wrapped packages to the check-in counter. The weight limit for us was 44 pounds, but these people found it convenient to pay the overweight charge to bring permitted household goods into Cuba.
One man waiting in the departure lounge was comical with three soccer balls strung around his neck and three cowboy hats nested on top of his head.
Walk along the side streets branching out like wheel spokes from any plaza and you find people selling goods — baked goods, beverages, clothing, prepared meals — from a window in the front of their home. Look beyond the window, and you see family life going on in the background: People watching TV, preparing meals or getting the kids ready for school.
Each neighborhood has its own bodega where locals can buy staples such as eggs, flour, rice, and beans when they are available. Residents are issued a government card certifying them to buy from a specific local bodega.
Here and there is a farmacia with very few products on its shelves. A pharmacist in our group was appalled by the dearth of available medicines.
Art galleries — both state-run and private — can be found here and there. The quality of the art is good, but the subject matter often tends to be quite abstract and not typical of Cuba. Artists’ studios proliferate offering a wide variety of art including themes of Santeria — the African spirit worship that is infused into Cuban Catholicism — history and the ever-present Revolution.
Che Guevara’s image is everywhere — but not so the Castro brothers. At one graphics studio in Trinidad, the manager explained that while salaries were set by the state, the purchase of art supplies had to come from paying customers.
On a visit to an art market the size of a convention center in Havana, I had a conversation with one of the painters. He said most of the hundreds of small souvenir shops in the market were owned by the state but painters at the corners of the building were mostly private business people.
Some Cuban artists are wealthy. Jose Fuster — Cuba’s Picasso — and Salvador Gonzales Escalona draw tens of thousands of dollars for their unique and frankly weird paintings. A small colony of artists live in the self-sustaining mountain eco village of La Terrazas, outside Havana, where we were welcomed by naturalist painter Lester Campa who can be found on the Internet.
Cienfuegos, on the southern coast, is the antithesis of the cities and streets found elsewhere in Cuba. A former French enclave, it is today a city of comparative wealth thanks to its oil refineries.
Our group was amazed by the broad, gleaming clean, pedestrian shopping street that stretched for several blocks to a beautiful plaza in the center of town. Along each side of the street stood large stores, their big plate glass windows brimming with well-stocked displays of clothing, furniture, appliances, and other consumer goods not commonly seen elsewhere.
It would not be a stretch to imagine this to be an upscale suburb of Miami.
One of the main sources of revenue is tourism — all of it state controlled. Some three million tourists come to Cuba every year, primarily to sun on its pristine Caribbean beaches and sip tangy mojitos.
Although exact figures are pretty sketchy, about 15,000-20,000 are Americans defying the Department of State’s ban on travel to Cuba by entering via third countries. A much larger cohort of American tourists — perhaps as many as 100,000 — arrive each year under the U.S.-sanctioned people-to-people program.
These visitors don’t get to see the beaches — much less snorkel — but they do buy a lot of rum drinks, go salsa dancing and spend money on hotels, restaurants, taxis, meals, souvenirs, historic and cultural venues and tips for low-paid state tourism-connected workers.
Our twenty-something guide summed up what a lot of Cubans told us when he said: “My generation likes all the things the government does for us, but we would like to also have economic freedom. We want both.”