let them smoke cigars

ooh look, fresh veggies

from the state-run chocolate shop

We walk and we walk and we walk.  We walk into the more modern part of the city in search of other food options.  In each district there’s a state market, the agro, where you can buy three or four kinds of vegetable and no fruit. Maybe papaya.  On the street vendors come around with small carts or barrows with one or two items such as bananas or papaya or onions.  Then there are some smaller food shops selling dry and packaged goods, but mostly bottles of Havana Club, in all shades, and beer and pop.   There are lots of small eating places, café seems too grandiose a word.  Most look like people’s front rooms, or they sell over a counter at their open door.  To shop locally we need to have the regular Cuban peso, the moneda nacional.  So now we are carrying two lots of cash – and being careful not to mix them up.  There are 25 pesos to a CUC.

driving tourists around Havana might be one of the best paid jobs in Cuba

 After a long walk we find a promisingly large supermarket, busy with shoppers.  But the promisingly large supermarket stocks disappointingly little.  The shelves of one aisle are stocked with the same item – vegetable oil.  The next one, sardines.  The next one olives and tomato paste in large jars.  It feels like a bad joke after the spoils and luxuries of the US and Mexico.  We want to self-cater on the road and while we have a kitchen.  But what with?  Having decided on a handful of, literally, choice items we join the queues at the tills.   

 We are now starting to get the hang of Cuba.  It’s all about the waiting.  Why rush about when you have to wait for everything all the time.  Wait for the buses, wait at the market, wait in the shops.  Service is as you’d expect in a ‘communist’ state where workers are paid a poor salary, distinctly not performance-related, of around 25 CUCs a month.  That’s 25 dollars. No wonder everyone looks like they can’t be arsed.  I wouldn’t be.  Leaving the shop with our precious items of oats, nesquik, digestive biscuits and wholewheat flour it’s hard to believe that these are times of plenty for the Cubans.  When the USSR split up and the shoulder Cuba had been leaning on was suddenly absent, the country slid into desperate straits.  Food became scarce, people had sugar and water for breakfast.  Those years are euphemistically referred to as The Special Period.   

 smal businesses are now allowed

But this One Man State finally began to change when the One Man finally stood down and handed power over to his brother.  Or maybe the people handed power to his brother.  How does it go again?  Anyway, Raul loosened things up a little and Cubans are now beginning to discover the promise and the perils of free-marketeering and the possibilities that arise with small businesses.  But until there is some loosening of the economic sanctions and a radical shift in the economic structure of the country, for now, the majority will have to put up with cheap rum and cigars and subsidised basics like rice and beans.