Mattress Repairers Work Miracles in Santiago de Cuba
Loss of household goods caused by hurricanes drives up demand for mattress makers in the east of the country.
HAVANA TIMES – In Santiago de Cuba, the mattress repair person’s trade has survived blackouts, hurricanes, dollarization, and broken promises. It has no flashy sign and barely any presence on social media, but it endures through word of mouth, the urgency of sleeping without pain, and the impossibility, for most people, of buying a new mattress. Here, where heat clings to the body even at dawn and rain seeps through hole-riddled roofs, a mattress is not a luxury: it’s a daily battle.
In many Santiago households, people still sleep on mattresses that have more history than comfort. Some arrived with grandparents’ weddings; others were inherited, patched, flipped a thousand times. For decades—through the 1970s, 1980s, and much of the 1990s—buying a new mattress was almost an exception. The rationed market reserved them for newlyweds, and even then availability wasn’t guaranteed. The arrival of the dollar in the 1990s opened a crack: mattresses reappeared in government stores, but at prices out of reach for most. Today, to buy a new one you need hard currency or relatives abroad. For everyone else, the solution remains the same: call a mattress maker.
Omar has been in the trade for 32 years. He’s a private mattress maker and says it not with epic pride, but with the calm of someone who knows his work is necessary. “This isn’t to get rich,” he says right away. “It barely covers food for me, my wife, and our three children.” His workday starts at five in the morning. Quick coffee, tools in hand, and off to work. If the power allows, it can be pitch dark by the time he finishes. His living room is a permanent workshop: piles of batting, wire, gutted mattresses, cover fabrics, and his agile hands working pliers, clamps, and needles with a dexterity learned through repetition.
A new mattress made by Omar costs around 30,000 pesos today (US $70). Repairing a worn one can run between 18,000 and 20,000, depending on how sagged it is, how many springs need replacing, and the condition of the batting. It’s not cheap, but it’s still more affordable than buying one in hard currency, which can exceed $300 dollars. “Many of the houses that rent to tourists in Santiago have had their mattresses made by me,” he says, aware that private rentals fuel demand.
Hurricanes have turned this trade into a cyclical necessity. Every time heavy rains fall or a cyclone passes through, mattresses are among the first losses. Hurricane Melissa, which struck the eastern part of the country, left flooded homes and soaked, unusable mattresses in its wake. “After a cyclone, the phone doesn’t stop ringing,” Omar says. Soaked, warped, full of damp and mold, many victims can only put them out in the sun to see if they recover something inside. Sleeping on them is torture but replacing them is beyond many people’s means.
The problems of the trade begin long before there’s a client, Omar admits. Getting raw materials is an odyssey: springs, batting, wire, fabrics. Everything is very expensive, scarce, or only obtainable through contacts in the informal market. On top of that comes transportation. Moving a mattress around the city, loading it onto a truck, has become a challenge now that fuel is scarce. “There are jobs I can’t take because I have no way to get there,” he acknowledges.
Even so, Omar offers up to two years of warranty. Not everyone does. The sector is riddled, he warns, with informal operators and scammers. “The hardest thing, besides getting materials, is maintaining your reputation.” Stories circulate in Santiago of repairs that last only weeks, of mattresses that look new on the outside but are far from it within.
Moraima has one of those stories. She bought her mattress when she got married, in the 1960s. “It was good quality and we took good care of it,” she says. The problems were obvious: a few springs poking out and sunken edges. One day, from the kitchen, she heard three men passing down the street shouting that they repaired mattresses. She had saved “a little money” because sleeping was becoming difficult. The mattress makers set up their rig in the yard, took the mattress apart, and the batting seemed to be in good shape. Moraima had to run to the ration store and left her grandson watching, but the boy got distracted by his phone. She paid 15,000 pesos. On the outside, everything looked perfect. Inside, it wasn’t.
“When I lay down it sounded like paper,” she recalls. Months later, the center of the mattress was completely sunken. She had to call another mattress maker. When they opened it up, they discovered the scam: the original batting had been replaced with polyethylene sacks, the kind used for rice. Sleeping on that was, literally, a lie wrapped in new fabric.
Stories like Moraima’s circulate through the city and feed distrust. That’s why mattress makers like Omar live by their names. Every job is a test. Every satisfied client is a guarantee more effective than any piece of paper.
In Santiago de Cuba, getting a good night’s rest is almost a form of resistance. A mattress is not just any piece of furniture: it’s where one sleeps, falls ill, endures Chikungunya convalescence, and grows old. Between inaccessible hard currency, hurricanes, and scams, mattress makers keep stitching together imperfect solutions. They don’t perform miracles, but spring by spring they uphold one of the most basic needs of daily life: being able to lie down without fear of sinking or having a spring dig into you.
First published in Spanish by 14ymedio and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.