Cuba 2001

Starring Erin-Kate, Sean, Yasmina, and Che

o spend only one week in a country as unique as Cuba is a shame, but it’s all we had. We landed in Havana, and I was nervous going through customs, as we had no hotel reservations. This is highly discouraged by the government, and all kinds of obstacles are placed in your path to prevent you from contributing to the capitalist mini-economy of Cuba. Nevertheless, we made it through and our taxi dropped us off EK and Yaz capitolio at a beautiful, tree-shaded walkway in Centro Habana (Central Havana). The heat was oppressive, so I sat with our luggage while the girls, Yasmina and Erin-Kate, went off with some locals to check out their houses.

Cubans can rent out rooms in their houses to tourist, but must comply with various regulations, wade through swamps of bureaucracy, and pay a fat $100 fee/tax every month. They usually rent their rooms out in the low season in Habana for 15 to 30 dollars a night. By contrast, doctors make about $12 a month in wages.

While the girls walked around in the suffocating humidity, I sat in the shade and talked with the various characters who approached me with their pitch, celebrating the luxuries and amenities of their rooms for rent, which were all “private, comfortable, and secure.” I had a great time chatting up the locals. One pair, a couple of older black women, really took a shine to me. The eldest, Acasia, was 71 years old and running full-throttle on the spirits of fermented sugar cane. She held a plastic, cafeteria-style coffee cup full of rum in one hand, gesticulated wildly with the other, and regaled me with tales of her years of service to the government as a technician, alternating with accolades about her friend's apartment for rent. Her friend, Cari, was about 55, and she was trying to send Acasia off to the market to buy some onions, with little success. Finally, Acasia stumbled off, and Cari and I spent some time talking. There was a separate two-bedroom apartment on the rooftop of the building where she lived, which belonged to a relative, and which she would rent to us for $30 a night. Considering the tourist hotels are $50 to $150 a night per person, it sounded pretty nice.

hen the girls returned from their first inspection, they looked rather worn down by the combination of heat, humidity, and stair climbing (elevators are a yanqui capitalist superfluity). Fortunately, the girls agreed to a second inspection with Cari, and no sooner had they left than another salesman came in for the kill. Ernesto, a very white, well-heeled and polite retired economist, with his fair-sized paunch, seemed rather taxed by the climate. This is the beginning of the Cuban summer, and consequently, the really hot season.

Ernesto assured me that his $20 room was superior to Cari’s, and we had become fast friends by the time the girls returned. However, when I saw the look of terror and exhaustion on their sweaty faces when queried about a third inspection, we had to decline Ernesto’s offer and move in with Cari.

With lots of assistance we managed to haul ourselves and our luggage up a tightly wound cement staircase to the fourth floor rooftop and into our underdeveloped digs. We went straight to lunch at the house of a nearby black family. While the husband and 5 or 6 kids watched TV, the wife cooked us up a decent meal with cold beer for just under $30, which she served to us in a small courtyard in the center of their house. Then the father and our guide, a friend of Cari’s who led us to this house, took me into a small but beautiful, high-ceilinged room at the front of the house. Apparently, like every other person in Cuba, he worked in a cigar factory and had a few boxes of black market cigars, which he would sell to me at one-quarter the price of the government-run stores. There are two problems with this: first, you need a legal receipt from a government store to take them out of Cuba, and second, you can’t bring Cuban cigars into the US. But try telling that to these high-pressure hustlers. They make around twelve dollars a month at the factory and they charge eighty dollars for a box of Cohibas, one of the world’s greatest cigars. I bought one for five bucks, and it was delicious. They charge fifteen dollars for the same cigar in a store in Mexico, so it felt like a bargain.