Summer in Cuba: “These People are Obsessed with US Dollars”
HAVANA TIMES – Nearly three months before the start of the summer holidays, in April, Ledis Fernandez went to one of the travel agencies in the city of Camagüey to book a day trip to Cayo Cruz. The excursion, with round trip transportation, lunch and use of the facilities, was scheduled for mid-July, and was meant to be a chance to reunite with relatives living in other provinces and abroad, who would organize their schedules to spend the day together at the Camagüey beach resort.
But soon after signing the contract, problems began. “They contacted me to say that the trip we had booked couldn’t go ahead due to transportation issues. It was a situation they hadn’t informed us about in time, and it caused trouble for our relatives who don’t live in Camagüey. Despite the inconvenience, I went back to the agency and made all the necessary changes for another day in July,” recalls Ledis.
From then on, they assumed she only had to wait for the new date to arrive—until a week before the trip, the agency messaged her via WhatsApp to say it was no longer happening.
“They told me all reservations for July and August were being canceled because they were going to start charging in dollars. They said for the price we had paid in pesos, we could go to Santa Lucía instead, and gave us this line about how they were going to clean the beach there, etc., etc.… If we didn’t accept, they’d refund our money.”
“It was a disappointment and a show of disrespect from people who were supposed to protect our rights. On top of that, there was the emotional cost, because there were kids who were really looking forward to that trip. And all of it was over dollars,” she lamented on social media.
Her complaint was mainly a “way to vent,” she acknowledged. Beyond the official rhetoric, Cubans are effectively captive consumers, with no real way to push back against abuses like this or others of the same kind.
Who doesn’t want to go to the beach?
Santa Lucía, the alternative proposed to Ledis and her family, is also a beach resort on Camagüey’s northern coast. For decades, it was the main beach option for residents of that province and neighboring ones, but a lack of maintenance to the swimming areas and infrastructure, along with the transportation crisis, has nearly erased it from the tourism map.
The final blow came from sargassum a type of seaweed. The presence of this invasive seaweed has grown exponentially in the Caribbean and Atlantic, forcing countries in the region to spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually on cleanup efforts. But in Cuba, beach cleaning tends to be limited to the areas of high-end hotels frequented by foreign tourists. Beaches designated for Cuban vacationers suffer from a neglect that borders on abandonment. In Santa Lucia’s case, the uncontrolled spread of sargassum has earned it the nickname “Sargalucia.”
These circumstances help explain the reluctance of Ledis and her family to accept the change proposed by the agency. Authorities had already in the past announced clean-up plans for Santa Lucia that never came to fruition. On the other hand, Cayo Cruz is a small island where half a dozen luxury hotels run by French and Spanish companies are located. “The beach is pristine, nothing like Santa Lucía,” said another Camagüey resident who vacationed there recently.
The city of Camagüey is the furthest from the coast of all Cuban provincial capitals. Its inland location means that, for its residents, summer instantly conjures images of the sea. Still, for many families, even a day trip to Santa Lucía is a difficult dream to fulfill.
One of those families is that of Liuba Rivero, a single mother of two boys whom she can barely support with her two jobs. Her budget is simple: as a worker at a private café, she earns between 8,000 and 10,000 pesos a month ($21–26 USD), depending on sales and tips, and another 2,000 pesos ($5) by cleaning a house weekly. Even though this adds up to nearly double her former salary as an employee of the state electrical company, no matter how much she tries to stretch it, it’s not enough to cover daily expenses and the additional costs of a single one-day beach outing.
“Private buses don’t charge less than 1,500 pesos per person. Just the round trip would cost us 4,500 pesos, not including food. I especially feel bad for my younger son, who’s ten and loves the water, but we either eat or go to the beach,” she lamented.
Summer options
Access to summer recreation is a blunt reflection of the social inequality that now defines life in Cuba, and of the vulnerability most people live with.
Starting with food. Like Liuba, many mothers see the two-month summer break as a time when food expenses skyrocket. “With the kids home all day, they’re constantly eating. And if they go out, you have to give them money for outings and also for food. July and August are terrible months,” said Liuba.
This year, the usual tensions are compounded by the near-total elimination of rations (Cuba’s subsidized food distribution system) and increased power outages. For example, rice, which should be sold in bodegas for five pesos per pound, can now only be found at farmers’ markets for between 220 and 300 pesos. Bread, for which each person is entitled to a daily 60-gram roll costing 75 cents, must be bought at prices between 25 and 30 pesos.
“And you can’t count on TV anymore, which used to be the kids’ ‘tranquilizer.’ With so many blackouts, poor people just have to find ways to entertain themselves,” said Anisleidys Montalvo, a homemaker who works as a manicurist from her home.
Taking care of her five-year-old daughter and nine-year-old stepson, she takes comfort in knowing that at the beginning of August, they’ll spend a week at the Punta de Ganado camping facility in Santa Lucia.
They’ll have to get there on their own, as the state-run Campismo Popular agency no longer includes transportation in its bookings due to the fuel shortage. Friends who have stayed there recently warned her to bring drinking water and a small cooler, since the water provided isn’t potable and refrigerators have been removed from the cabins. For years, guests have also needed to bring all their food, due to the poor quality and high prices of the meals sold on-site.
“The place has really declined, but Cubans have no other options. What it costs for one person to spend a night at a hotel pays for a week for the four of us at the campsite. And now, hotel bookings and services can only be paid for in dollars. These people are obsessed with foreign currency,” Anisleidys reflected.
To cover the trip expenses, she’s been taking on more clients than usual, while her husband alternates his state driving job with under-the-table gigs. Even so, every summer it gets a little harder for them to achieve their goal: making sure “the kids get to spend at least one week at the beach.”
As Cubans say “fijate”, when regular Cubans who have previously sent their children to summer camps or for whom family reunions are normally possible summer events are suddenly unable to make these things happen for themselves, the beginning of the end is in view. Poor Cuban people have never had any hopes of doing this stuff. To lose the possibility today is no new loss for them. The poor in Cuba during Fidel Castro’s youth had been poor for many generations. But when an upper-middle class attorney like Fidel felt the inequality of times, the revolution began to take root. Likewise, today, when the owners of MPYMES start to suffer because of the blackouts and lack of banking services, the Castro regime had better begin to gas up their getaway jets on the runway.