No Money and Plenty of Garbage
By Jorge Fernandez Era (Matraca / El Toque)
HAVANA TIMES – Yesterday I went to withdraw money from the Toyo ATM and at times I thought that the fish market located thirty meters away had stocked up. I opted to enter the bank, located due east at a similar distance from the Police Station thinking that there, closer to the vault, it would be easier for me to extract money, that which man invented as a means of payment and today doesn’t even pay enough to eat.
It wasn’t long before I won a place in a vault when the cashier clarified that I could only extract two thousand pesos, which is what a carton of eggs costs in front of the Toyo Bakery —once the most important bakery in the capital, today named “The Flour of the Desert”.
You have to have (a carton of) eggs to hear something like that and assimilate that they can only give you the money in bills with denominations of less than ten. I had gong confident of withdrawing five hundred peso bills and I came out —in full view of the guard on duty— as if I had robbed the bank, with a plastic bag containing four hundred five-peso notes. Such equals in tension what happens in Western films.
