Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 3, 1993 TAG: 9310070413
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JOHN RICE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: HAVANA LENGTH: Long
Up a shabby staircase in central Havana, across a set of warped planks in a dark and dirty room, a stooped woman sets plates of savory pork fricasse and rice onto a bare wood table.
She bursts into a gap-toothed laugh when she gives a name: Marta Perez, the equivalent of Jane Doe. She says the meat was bought on the black market.
``Because there is nothing [in the official stores], you have to buy on the street,'' she says, scurrying between bubbling pots of beans and stew cooking over small gas stoves.
``I'm a revolutionary,'' she insists, loyal to President Fidel Castro. Perez says she's running an illegal restaurant to support her family, but guilt is making her think of shutting down.
``All of my family work for the state,'' she says. ``Many of my family are party members.''
It's a place where the average salary runs about $3 a month, where 30 days' pay might not buy you two chickens, yet where nobody seems to be starving.
It's a land where 30 years of socialism is being slowly pounded apart by the tides of classical economic law. Cuba today seems all demand and no supply.
Almost everyone who wants it has a job. But with factories and offices shuttered full or part time, many have little work to do.
So many people like Perez turned to the black market that the government in September legalized a broad array of small-scale private jobs, ranging from construction worker to chauffeur.
The government apparently hopes to sop up some of the excess money still in private hands, pull in some taxes and try to get private individuals to produce what the state has failed to do.
With everyone paid by the state, but with little produced, inflation is tearing at the Cuban peso, now worth about 70 to the dollar although the official rate is one-to-one.
Everyone has some money, but little to buy. Everyone has time, but little to do to fill it.
Havana's splendid parks and boulevards are filled with chatting adults and playing children.
Power cuts of more than 12 hours a day in midsummer idled cooling fans and air conditioners, driving many to sleep outdoors, hoping for a breeze to cut the humid heat.
On weekend nights, a spidery crush of bicycles tangles Havana's waterfront Malecon Boulevard not far from the U.S. diplomatic mission as tens of thousands of young people meet to dance to music by Michael Jackson and Juan Luis Guerra thundering from an open-air discotheque set up by the government.
The Malecon is a tropical Times Square, Cuba's pride and shame.
From the same promenade where thousands gather to dance, a few desperate Cubans risk death each month by setting out for Florida in huge inner tubes.
Hundreds gather with friends and bottles of homemade liquor on the Malecon wall to while away the balmy nights as the surf hisses through the rocks below. Tourists who wander down the sidewalk also hear a chorus of hissing from young hookers or scam artists seeking dollars.
Dollars are legal now for the first time since the early days of Castro's 1959 revolution. Cuba's government hopes to lure desperately needed foreign currency from exiles abroad to save the revolution.
But so far there has been little rush to the well-stocked foreign currency stores previously limited largely to tourists. Officials boosted prices there by 50 percent a week before legalizing dollars.
The government is free with gloomy statistics: Cuba will import only about $1.7 billion this year, down from about $8.1 billion in 1989. Oil imports have fallen below 6 million metric tons from more than 13 million. This year's sugar harvest, Cuba's main source of income, is the worst in 30 years.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and its European allies has stripped Cuba of about 80 percent of its trade.
On the outskirts of Havana, sprawling concrete buildings stand empty or half-finished for lack of power or parts, some with construction cranes rusting above them.
Dump trucks rumble along country roads brimming with passengers in their cargo beds.
They stop at bus stops where people by the score wait carrying bags filled with fruits, vegetables and meats bought in the countryside or with scarce goods like toilet paper and soap they are carrying to exchange in the countryside.
Bicycles are pressed into service as cargo vehicles, and sometimes squealing trussed pigs can be seen ferried on the backs of bikes.
The hotel hustlers and begging children largely disappear beyond the tourist zones. In the lush countryside, work is harder, but the food is better, with meat or fish served nearly every day to farm workers. Some have abandoned the city.
``When I came it seemed very hard. But now I'm used to it,'' says Josefina Rosale, a former kindergarten cook helping a sweating crew load bananas south of Havana.
``You learn the value of things'' in the country, she says.
Prices seem fantastic. Little ration shops in every neighborhood offer a month's worth of rice and beans for pennies. The blackboard in front of one advises that five eggs per person are available every 15 days, that chicken is on sale for pregnant women at 1.40 pesos.
Others with a hunger for meat apparently have to turn to the black market, where a 2-pound chicken can cost 140 pesos. An average month's wage is a little more than 200 pesos.
At odd times, Cubans can find a street-corner stand still serving up cups of coffee for a few pennies.
Some hamburger stands and pizza shops still operate - by reservation only. Tickets are doled out at workplaces or by neighborhood party offices.
At a hamburger joint in Havana, a customer who gives his name only as Juan works at eating a double burger filled with a mixture of beef, soy and beef blood, one of only 400 the shop served that day. He says people in his neighborhood get one ticket every two weeks.
``If you live in an area with a hamburger restaurant, it's hamburger. If they have pizza, it's pizza. If there's no restaurant, you commit suicide,'' he quips.
On an eastern fringe of Havana, Roberto Molina demonstrates the ingenuity some Cubans have shown in the face of hard times.
He displays small wooden toys that he makes - a legal sideline that brings him about about four times the average wage.
Standing before a framed photograph showing him with Castro, Molina holds up a hand-carved pellet rifle that features a gunsight salvaged from the U.S.-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
``A friend gave it to me. It was a trophy of war.''
Molina has modified his Chinese Flying Pigeon bicycle into something resembling a Harley Davidson, with bits and pieces cast by hand or borrowed from machines as exotic as a MiG fighter plane.
He installed 10 speeds of gears, a speedometer, three headlights and a radio driven by an old Soviet battery.
The walls bear framed medals from military service in Ethiopia and Angola. The 50-year-old Molina remains an ardent Communist, the son of Communist militants persecuted under the Batista regime Castro overthrew in 1959.
``When I was a boy,'' he says, ``I dreamed of playing baseball. I wanted to be Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Stan Musial.'' A centerfielder, he says he had been scouted by the now-defunct Washington Senators.
Came the revolution ``and I had a machine gun in my hands'' as a member of the militia.
``There are many who think that Cuba is a paradise. That's an error,'' he says. ``But things are much better than under capitalism. I believe that capitalism will never return here.''
But his daughter, Belkis, 22, is frustrated by hard times and argues with her father's approval of a new law that lets Cubans own dollars - a measure that officials admit will benefit black marketeers, workers in the tourist industry and those with family abroad.
The neighbors will have dollars, she says, ``and we who are revolutionar ies will not. Yes, that bothers me.
``I want things to be better than this,'' she says.
``I want to get up at 6 in the morning and go to work and get a salary and be able to buy what I want.''
by CNB