The sad reality

The truth is I had been the target – as will any tourist – of solicitations from nearly the first minute. No sooner had I stepped out of my casa particular, within 5 minutes of being in Havana, a crippled boy or youth made friends and had dragged me to the deep, dark back of a seedy bar a couple of blocks from my casa. "Won't you buy me a mojito?", he nearly begged. I am sure you can see through this scheme. It takes a lot of effort to keep saying no constantly. In other places in Cuba too, this would happen, over and over again.

You may wonder why. The average Cuban takes home between 10 and 20 CUC a month. The "CUC" is the convertible Cuban unit, equivalent to around 23 or 24 pesos, which is what the locals use as currency. You can therefore imagine what it means for a panhandler to get 0.25 CUC "for biscuits for his child" or whatever else. It is a huge deal.

But while there is poverty, there is also great inequality. A band will on average receive tips of 0.50 to 1 CUC from many of the dining or drinking parties. You can see that they may do quite well for themselves. Then you think about the casas charging 25 or even 35 CUC for a room per night. These guys are minting money, you think.

Not so. One of my hostesses explained that a licensed casa must pay 400 CUC every month to the government, regardless of whether anyone stayed and it was not optional to pay only for some months. Imagine that. So while they handle much more money, they too have to eke it out in the end, though one imagines they do rather better than the average campesino (farmer).

I have a story about a campesino I met in Trinidad, but I am not emotionally prepared to write it just yet.