Today’s Culture of Rip Offs in Cuba

By Angry GenXe

Scene One

HAVANA TIMES – I had just gotten onto one of the buses that circulate through the breezier outskirts of the Cuban capital—not that there was anything cooler about the inside of it—after a brief struggle to board. And then, that absence of cooler was suddenly interrupted by a face. Yes, a face: that of a man, somewhat older, without any clearly defined racial features, long hair, and scruffy sideburns from days without shaving. He was more face than man, more face than body, because he was sobbing and mumbling something unintelligible. Passengers usually steer clear of such individuals, wary of the possible effects of a disturbed mental state.

As the bus moved along, the mumbling began to grow more articulate and understandable.

“I got scammed. That guy ripped me off—all the money my Brazilian enologist friend gave me.” (What the hell is an enologist? I thought to myself.)

“We’re enologists, he’s my colleague, we’ve been working together for years. He came to an event here and I promised him a walk around Havana. We talked the whole time; no, we weren’t drunk—just really tired. A whole night making plans and taking notes while walking around Havana. For projects… you have to have projects…”

Clarity began to emerge from the man’s catastrophe. I tried to listen while other passengers turned their faces away.

“We didn’t have a single glass of hard liquor, but we were exhausted from so much walking, and we barely had any Cuban money left. He then gave me a 100-euro bill. He had to go to the airport, and I had to go home. I didn’t even have 10 Cuban pesos, but I had to get home, so I desperately searched for a place to change the currency. But no street exchanger at that early hour had enough pesos to break a 100-euro bill. There was no way to exchange if for smaller notes either.”

I imagined the situation. Informal exchange points are often found in some corner of those decrepit areas that make up Old Havana, or in a butcher shop, a café, or a privately-run sales stand. They’re strongly discouraged, but on the other hand, the official exchange rate is absurdly unfair, and even then there’s not always cash, or electricity, or the official spots are simply closed. When I need to change some foreign currency that “comes my way,” I only deal with people I know and trust. Anything else reeks of nerves and scams.

“I was really tired… I wanted to grab a cab and get home quickly. I needed to sleep so I could write out the projects we discussed,” the “enologist” added, seemingly aware I was listening.

“Then, on a corner near the San Jose Warehouses, this guy showed up. He looked like your typical ‘tourist hustler,’ what they used to call jineteros” (I recalled the original meaning of the word: not necessarily “sex worker,” but someone looking to quickly get something out of a yuma—a foreigner. Tourist guides always advise avoiding these types.)

“I hailed a ‘taxi,’” he said.“I asked if he knew where I could change money in the area, and he said: ‘Let’s go.’ He took me to a nearby boxing gym, which turned out not to be a gym anymore but a shelter for people who lost their homes due to building collapses in Havana. Inside, there were families occupying makeshift cubicles made of mattresses and boards. ‘Give me the bill; I’ll be right back with the change; I live here.’”

Bad situation for Mr. “Enologist.” A 99.99% guaranteed scam. The bus was already moving past shady areas of Old Havana, with its collapsed buildings and boxing-gym shelters, behind us. Some passengers, unwilling listeners, started smirking.

“I didn’t want to give him the money… I asked him to bring the exchange money first… but he said, ‘I live here, my name is Alexis, everyone here knows me.’”

The scammed man said he refused at first. More tears.

“Just a few days ago, my Brazilian enologist friend told me the same thing happened to him: an informal exchanger took his money into an alley and never came back. And just last week, the pastor at my church said someone tried to do the same thing to him in this area, but he didn’t fall for it.”

I thought the “enologist’s” sobbing would engulf the entire bus. “I knew it was going to happen… They warned me! I even sensed it. I could almost see it happening… But Alexis told me: ‘Trust me, on my manly honor; don’t you trust me? That’s offensive. I swear on my late mother—today’s her day. Give it to me, I’ll be right back…’ I gave him the bill. He never came back.”

“I asked inside the shelter, and they showed me an open window (‘we usually keep it shut’)—that’s where the guy escaped through.”

“You got scammed.”

That was the verdict of the people in the shelter to the “enologist”.

In Cuba, you can be many things, but you can’t be a comemierda. Not an idiot.

Still, I imagined the enologist’s moral dilemma and the scammer’s subtle manipulation. The appeal to a “brother’s” morals, to his “manly honor,” to the “memory of his deceased mother,” against the imminent risk of being ripped off. A well-executed emotional blackmail.

“I felt like I had committed the dumbest act of my entire life,” said the “enologist.”“That guy shoved his dead mother right into his manly honor. People like that should be put on national television and have their faces bashed in with sledgehammers. In front of their mothers. We tape the mothers’ mouths shut. When the guy dies from the sledgehammer blows, with his brains splattered all over, we shoot the mother in the temple. With a pistol. All of it on TV. Then we toss the bodies in the sea to feed the sharks.”

It seemed the passengers had divided into two groups: some turned red, sweating, waving their arms anxiously; others were holding back laughter. No one cried. From the back of the bus, someone shouted:

“COMEMIERDA!”  This concludes my analytical section of the crime report.

Scene Two

ETECSA is a sui generis case of a joint venture with 100% Cuban state capital. Just a few days ago, from that monstrous telephone and internet company, they first announced that for a few hours they would suspend certain routine operations for mobile network customers—nothing major, just technical adjustments. But the next day, state-run media (NOT the SMS alerts from ETECSA itself, which the company usually uses to promote new top-up offers from abroad) announced changes to the financial operations of the state telecommunications monopoly. These changes consisted of a drastic reduction in the amount clients in Cuba could add to their phone balances: they would now be able to recharge ONLY 360 Cuban pesos per month (about $1.00 USD at the informal exchange rate) for all services (mobile network, internet, etc.). And to add more money, they would have to rely on transfers from charitable souls inside—and especially outside—the country. There was no prior announcement.

ETECSA’s user contract stipulates that any changes to rates or other terms and conditions must be announced to customers 30 calendar days in advance. They blatantly violated this. They also broke several existing rules in Cuban Civil Law and recent Decree-Laws.

This measure is a dramatic restriction of access for private users of the telecommunications services provided by this theoretically “socialist-for-the-people” company, and on top of that, it undermines the already limited opportunities of the most impoverished, vulnerable, and marginalized segments of Cuban society.

Now fully unfolding is the major conflict that this consensually labeled SCAM has unleashed between Cuba’s dwindling population and its entrenched politico-business oligarchy, which has held onto power for decades.

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Scene Three

It’s a modus operandi. In Cuba, scamming has become integral to social interaction. The poor scam each other (and “manly honor” and the “memory of my dearly departed mother” no longer hold any weight), the oligarchs scam the poor, and they also scam oligarchs from other countries—and everyone scams the tourists and the “international left” and “solidarity movements” that still support “this.” In rhetorical terms, the “criminal imperialist blockade” functions almost like “my manly honor and my late mother.” Yes, the mother exists, and the embargo is real, but their actual existence has nothing to do with the symbolic meaning they hold in the mega-cosmos of the SCAM.

Scamming moves up and down. It’s the operating principle of Cuba’s economy and its social dynamics—including upward mobility. The guy who scammed someone out of 100 euros exists because the scamming State does not provide secure, legal currency exchange options, and prefers to maintain a laughable exchange rate. That’s so scammers riding the financial flows of import companies and small private businesses (mipymes) can pocket the difference.

ETECSA scams its users because powerful people, both inside and outside the country, have already scammed ETECSA itself, draining its funds and leaving it broke and unable to invest in infrastructure. The people pay for this. But the people are used to scamming—and therefore understand the game. A few years ago, they said Cuba would finally have only one currency. Now there are at least five (Cuban peso, USD, Euro, MLC, and Clásica).

The “disguised dollar” has evolved from the benevolent CUC in cash (which in the late ’90s could be exchanged 1:1 for USD at any store, exchange house, or street kiosk), to a no-longer-so-“convertible” CUC that could no longer be exchanged freely for dollars (though it still worked the other way around at 1:1). Later, the dollar was hit with a 10% tax against the CUC—a measure that lasted years. When they removed it, 1 CUC was no longer worth 1 dollar, and they introduced the MLC card, which theoretically equaled 1 USD deposited in a bank account.

Now even the MLC card isn’t really 1:1. And unlike the CUC, the MLC has always been just a card, never cash. Using it—whether in the state or private sector, formally or informally—is only possible through digital banking networks, which are vulnerable to blackouts and system crashes. That’s when magnetic cards and phone-based transfers began to proliferate—in a country where, thanks to power outages and a lack of cash, withdrawing money from banks or ATMs (which often have no bills, are broken, or have no power) is a huge ordeal.

In the middle of all this comes the new CLÁSICA card, which supposedly—this time, yes—truly reflects its dollar balance, provided you prepay to obtain it, of course. But even this new princess is useless in a blackout, or when mobile networks or banking systems are down. And of course, real dollars can be loaded onto the Clásica card but getting them out is an extremely burdensome process.

Cuba (sorry, the National Bank of Cuba) lost a lawsuit in the Royal Courts of London against a “vulture fund,” and the reflexive response was to limit the repatriation of capital from Cuba to foreign companies.

A Deputy Minister of Energy and Mines—with a Russian surname—said in an interview published in official Cuban media that she didn’t know where the money from a multimillion-dollar loan from the Russian state—intended to improve electrical services in Cuba—had gone. Just like that. She still holds her position.

Hotels are being built left and right, and according to Cuba’s own official statistical yearbooks—publicly available—hotel construction has been the country’s largest investment for several years in a row, even as food, electricity, and even dollars to repair ETECSA infrastructure are lacking. It’s not even clear how much revenue these hotels generate; but according to competent economists, tourism is in decline, and visually at night, it’s obvious that most of their rooms are empty.

I’m not an economist. Let these lunatics explain to me how the other scams work.

In Cuba, we are all the scammed “enologist”, because the whole system is ruled by the “manly honor” of the oligarchy’s “(not-at-all-dead) mother.”

– You got scammed.

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Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.