The Wake Up Call: Understanding Cuba

Oh boy, we got quite the different idea of Cuba from today than we did yesterday. Today, we learned the real situation. What Cuba is actually like on the ground, how people actually live, and we did a deep dive into the incredibly messed up discrepancy between the Public and Private markets that’s making life on the island a living hell for most people.

In the morning, I took a walk around Old Havana while Keegan caught up on some more sleep. I began to realize that Havana Vieja felt familiar to me in a way more than just the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Though it has the colorful buildings, the 1500’s Spanish Forts, and the Rum of Puerto Rico, I realized that, at its core, Havana isn’t all that dissimilar to Marrakesh. The begging here is beyond belief. I got myself out of several scams, and there’s a good chance that a “friendly local” is actually going to lead you to a scam. I put my guard on high alert—after all, I’ve learned to do that after visiting places like this—and tried my best to see the city despite its begging problem.

As was my observation yesterday, I continue to believe that Havana is a beautiful city. Or at least, could be a beautiful city. The Malecón—the area looking out on the water—is super pretty, and the occasional fortress you’ll come across is so stunning. It really reminds you of just how old European presence and culture on this island is. The flies, animal poop, and trash certainly isn’t becoming on a stroll around the city, but keeping your eyes just a little above the ground, the fruit and churro stands, with radios blaring salsa and rumba were nice. I wouldn’t say it was the most enjoyable morning city walk I’ve ever taken, but I still enjoyed myself.

I had two more observations that would become relevant throughout the day as well. First, where were all the businesses? I was shocked that I couldn’t find a restaurant even if I wanted. It looked as if every building was residential. The restaurants on the maps app I had downloaded were just not where the app said they were. And second, the people were of every color. To be Cubano truly is a colorless term. Cubano is a racial identity of its own—not black, not white, and not mixed. I’d say the majority of the population tends to be darker—with more clear African ancestry—but I don’t think that’s really how Cubans think about their race. I’ll touch on this more later.

Anyways, we headed to Sloppy Joe’s Bar Havana, next to the Capitol Building (which, by the way, is 1 meter taller than the US capitol), to begin our tour of Havana with a Sociologist, Carlos.

The tour was amazing, and Carlos showed us that there’s not a single element of walking around the Cuban streets that’s normal. Every little detail—every place we passed—he had a story about that revealed something about Cuban society. Before we even left our meeting spot, we’d covered the gamut of topics about Cuban society. The first topic was WiFi and cellular. WiFi was only brought to the island between 2014 and 2016. It was only available in public—i.e. internet cafés—until 2018, for $1/hour. Not 1 peso, 1 US dollar. This is in a country, remember, where the average government salary is $15/month. The internet was, and still is, heavily censored. In 2018, the state telecom monopoly was opened, and mobile data existed on the island for the first time, allowing up to 6 GB/mo per person. Now, homes have WiFi, and though it’s still expensive, the situation is modernizing. Many people have internet and VPNs to access blocked sites.

A century ago, Cuba’s main source of income was sugar. All its neighbors are tourism economies. But now, how does Cuba, and more importantly, how do Cubans, make their money? Overwhelmingly, it’s remittances. Most of the money that comes to Cuba is not in exchange for Cuban goods and services. It’s sent by family members living in Miami. There’s a whole industry around bringing money, goods, and food into Cuba for relatives, and the Cuban Government knows this. That’s why it’s not hard to leave Cuba as a Cuban. The difficulty of achieving residence in the US may fluctuate, but it’s always easy to leave Cuba as long as you have the means to do so. Because, the government knows that the more Cubans are out of the country, the more money the island makes.

We then began walking, and our first stop was to admire, and then to discuss the classic cars.

The classic cars are, indeed, the symbol of Cuba, but they’re still used today. And they’re our first “case study” in the Cuban economy. The government does run a public bus service, which costs 2 pesos—about 0.5 cents. The buses come about once an hour, run very limited routes, and are often so full that you either can’t get on when they come, or need to hang on to the sides as the bus drives. So instead, Carlos choses to make his daily ride from Vedado to Havana Vieja by private shared taxi (Colectivo) instead. He pays 250 pesos for the 15-minute ride—still quite cheap for American standards, but 125 times the price of the public option—for a comfortable, reliable, on-time, frequent transportation option. Of course, as a private tour guide, Carlos can make enough money to afford a colectivo. But not all can. And to be able to afford that, Carlos has to break the law, working as a private tour guide. When prosecuted, that’s a serious offense—all tour guides in Cuba “must” be licensed, trained, and hired by the government, and must give the government’s perspective on the situation.

He told us this openly and loudly. Corruption is so rampant here that nobody cares when the law is broken. It’s the only way to make a living without relying on family from Miami to save you.

The Old Bacardí Factory

Before the “main attraction” of the day, we took a brief stop by the old Bacardí building. Bacardí Rum? It used to be Cuban, though now, it’s Puerto Rican. Remember that “Original Sin” of the Cuban Revolution I mentioned in the last post? The idea that at the start of the Revolution, everything was seized and people never got over it? Well here it is in full force. After the Bacardí factory was seized during the revolution, Bacardí moved out and took their secondary facility in Puerto Rico and made it the primary facility. The government has claimed that they’re renovating the building, but Carlos said that it’s been “under renovation” for his entire life. Clearly, there’s no incentive for doing quality work fast under a socialist system.

At this point, we crossed the street, standing in the shade of the corrugated aluminum demarcating the construction zone on the old Bacardí factory. We stood in front of an unassuming bakery, with a yellow façade and two doors. Here, in this totally ordinary location, Havana would no longer be this confusing, opaque mess. It wouldn’t be clear, but we would at least get a glimpse under the hood, seeing the real mechanisms that drive this country.

Left: The Two Bakery Doors, Right: Loaves of "Private" Bread

The bakery is a government bakery. Cuban flags and pictures of Fidel Castro decorate the inside. Entering through the right door, you see small loaves of bread. These are government rationed bread, costing one peso each—about 0.25 cents. You are allowed to buy one roll of government bread per day per person in your house, no more. Each family is given a ration card, which the bakery uses to mark that you have collected your day’s worth of rations.

 Now, on a $15/month salary, one quarter-cent piece of bread a day doesn’t sound too bad, does it? But if it’s not that bad, then why did the Carlos’s family’s ration book from last year show that they only bought government bread five times? Well, he said that growing up, his friends used to joke that government bread is better off used as a weapon than it is food. It’s rock hard and tasteless.

So what happens if you enter through the left side instead? There, you can buy large loaves of soft, tasty bread for about 150 pesos—150 times the price of the government roll. Out of all the people we saw waiting in line for bread, not a single one walked out of the bakery with government rolls. They all bought “private” bread.

In Cuba, this kind of corruption—stealing the resources from your government job to sell privately—is so common that it has a special name: búsqueda, meaning literally “the search.” In a country where nearly 70% of people are employed by the government, nearly everyone has a búsqueda, or benefits from a family member who has a búsqueda. For those who don’t have a government job, private business is allowed in very special circumstances and for very special reasons (mostly for importing goods and money to the island that are sanctioned for government import, in “micro, small, and medium private businesses” or “MIPYMEs”), but the majority of private business is done undercover. So, when I said we were wandering Havana in search of a restaurant or a store, it turns out that here, most private restaurants, or Paladars as they’re called, are in people’s houses. Most stores are secondary entryways to apartment buildings. This too is a way of stealing from the government—a búsqueda. You’re taking your government-allotted house, which is given to you for the purpose of living (don’t forget, you still have to pay rent on it!), and turning it into a business.

A Government Bodega, out of stock

The next hour of our tour was a “búsqueda tour of Havana,” stopping by all the different kinds of essential services provided by the government where people perform purposefully poorly, saving effort and quality for the private market. Teachers at local schools offer private tutoring sessions—illegal, by the way—at their houses after hours where they can teach the students real knowledge. Carlos studied in school as a sociologist—being a private guide, without following the government’s script is illegal. But hey, he gets $35/person in just an afternoon. Hospitals sell you all the equipment they need to carry out the free healthcare, so though the x-ray may be included in your social benefits of being a Cuban, the paper they print it on surely isn’t.

We visited a produce market inside the foyer of an apartment building. There, Carlos explained that farmers are required to give 80 – 90% of their produce to the government to be redistributed as rations. They keep the other 10 – 20%. So, if the government seizes the vast majority of what you produce for $15/month, then what would you do? Just tell the government you’re producing less, and sell the rest to the private market. Here in this produce market, the price of fruit and vegetables is comparable to what you may find in Meijer, and though it wasn’t as abundant as, say, a Peruvian or a Southeast Asian produce market, I would say it was well-stocked. The result of this? There’s not enough rations to go around. As a Cuban, it is your right to be able to purchase, at an affordable price, a singular pound of chicken per person per month, not per day, but per month at a bodega (government ration store). Don’t forget that most parts of Cuba get 16 – 22 hours of blackout per day, so it’s unreasonable to ask anyone to keep their pound of chicken fresh for a month, even if they wanted to. You get five eggs per person per month. If you want any more than your insufficient ration, you better be ready to pay 150–300 times more than you can at a bodega.

Isn’t this the fault of the farmers for declaring fractions of what they produce? Yes, but if you were being paid $15/month for your work, wouldn’t you do the same? The Cuban wage system exists, seemingly, to cut Cubans off from the outside world. If you devalue your currency so much that a $15/month wage is livable, then nothing in the rest of the world is affordable. To make any money, to buy any services or goods from off the island, a Cuban must make a living wage from a global perspective. So unless Cuba is a completely import-free society—unless they make all their medicines, food, automobiles, technology with good quality—this private market is going to exist with the wages the government provides. Putting the blame on the producers is, in my personal opinion, lazy and disingenuous. It’s the easy way out; it doesn’t address the problem that the poverty in Cuba is manufactured and maintained by the government.

 At that market, we asked Carlos another question: that market was so obviously a market—they didn’t try to hide it or disguise it as a residential building. How did they get away with it? Short answer, the government doesn’t care. Corruption is so rampant, and the need is so great that the government does not prosecute simply for having a búsqueda. The long answer, though, is what’s scarier. The government has spies all around. They monitor the private activities of everyone, and report that information back to the government. Nobody knows who the spies are, not even their families. So, though the government won’t waste prosecuting you for simply having a búsqueda, as soon as you protest, as soon as you become a problem for the government, they have overwhelming evidence of your illegal behavior and will prosecute you to the fullest extent. It’s mind games—we’ve already caught you, but if you play nice, and we’ll look the other way. If you can’t play nice, then we’ll grab you.

For Carlos, the tradeoff is worth it. He doesn’t plan on staying in Cuba for long; he, like many kids his age, is already in the process of obtaining his Spanish citizenship. He needs money to support his family and to buy a plane ticket. He’ll play nice as long as he can get that, and agrees that he’ll continue to do his illegal job until it’s no longer a problem for him.

Before this tour, I really don’t think I understood socialism. I knew vaguely how it worked and why it’s inherently flawed, but I don’t think I truly saw how it percolates into every aspect of society. I don’t think I understood its second, third, and fourth order effects. How it relies on regulating the natural human desire to succeed and to improve.

I should note that this is one interpretation of socialism, but it is perhaps the most completely implemented example of socialism we have in the world right now, and certainly the safest and easiest to visit.

I believe that though we are past the point of thinking of ourselves as “evolving” in any meaningful, natural way, that the forces of evolution are still the main drivers of our most fundamental actions, desires, and impulses. In a hunter-gatherer society, having the drive and the will to go out forage more, to hunt more, led to more nutrition for the tribe to share. It led to larger tribes and more offspring. It led to a longer, healthier life. In other words, a drive for success is coded into us, and despite millennia of civilization—where the incentive structures of evolution are shaken up—it remains. You can’t expect every citizen of a socialist society to play fair. You can’t ask every citizen to work their hardest, declare their production honestly, and to sit tight with the salary they’re provided. And in the same way that a drive for success is baked into our brains, so is competition. You can’t ask teacher Joe to be content with making as much money as teacher Jane when teacher Joe consistently sees better scores from his classes as teacher Jane. Humans seek out success and competition, and a fully functioning Cuban socialist society requires humans to forego those instincts for benefits they hardly reap.

It was truly eye-opening to me seeing those downstream effects of the Cuban interpretation of socialism. Seeing how everyone copes with it, how everyone has learned to eke out their living in this messed up system. I was angry and frustrated at the state of the system and the quality of life the system provides to the law-abiding citizen, but at the same time, I was optimistic that the people have adapted. That those with a drive for success, those who are willing to take big risks do indeed make it. They invent creative solutions to provide for themselves and their families to survive in, and sometimes to beat, this system.