The closeness of July and August is felt. After ten in the morning being on the street becomes uphill every day. Repellent, sunscreen, water bottle, toilet paper in case you have to go to the bathroom and patience, a lot of patience. This Thursday the heat is unbearable, so I cross the Central Park at full speed with its set of white marbles that make the sun bounce. This time I’m not looking for a sink drain or wood sandpaper. I’m going to do a more difficult task: deposit dollars on a Classic card.
It was a friend’s turn to buy gasoline after more than two months in the virtual queue. His daughter’s wedding depends on him being able to put 20 liters into the tank of the old Lada that is older than his future wife. As a gift, the couple has asked that everyone who can contribute some money to recharge those blue cards that are the hocus-pocus for shopping in supermarkets and service centers.
Before, people wanted, on their wedding day, to receive boxes with bottles of wine, bouquets of roses, perfumes or jewelry. But now we inhabit a stark world where being able to move the wheels of a vehicle feels like having received as a gift a gold ring with a multi-carat diamond. Rice is also not thrown when the bride and groom come out to say “I do”. The pound exceeds 300 pesos in the markets and no one is going to throw that much money into the air.
After raising the dollars for gasoline among several friends, another bitter pill comes. In all of Havana there are few places where you can recharge a Classic card, issued by the financial arm of the military: Fincimex. These premises are at the expense of blackouts, connection failures with the bank and any other problem ranging from a clogged pipe to the consequences of chikungunya suffered by an employee.
I head to the Harris Brothers store on O’Reilly Street in Old Havana. In front of the main entrance there is already a queue of a dozen people waiting for the same procedure. The wait is distressing. The sun is already quite stinging, there is no place to sit and a few meters away a sewer ditch spreads its “aromas”. To enter the tiny place where they recharge the Clásica you have to leave your wallet in the market’s baggage. In every store in Cuba where something more or less valuable is sold, one must get rid of backpacks, bags and packages. We are all potential thieves for the Cimex corporation that manages these markets.
Throughout the entire journey I have not seen a single tourist. The guard outside the Floridita looked bored. At the door of the La Moderna Poesía bookstore, closed years ago, a homeless old man was dozing. On the stretch of Obispo Street that I can see, only a peanut seller and an employee of a private restaurant circulate, dressed in a very white shirt and a black bow tie, who is looking towards the ground with a bored face. Surely there are fewer and fewer tips, I think.
The dollar has always been best received by waiters, bartenders and bathroom attendants throughout the country. Not all tips are the same. Foreign currency, whether American or European, lifts spirits, brings smiles to the tired faces of waiters, and even makes disinfectant and toilet paper appear in the bathroom of the most humble business. But dollars are scarce because almost no tourists arrive. If it could, the regime would collect all those who circulate on the streets and I would not be surprised if in some offices “up there”, there are still those who dream of criminalizing the fula again and putting us in jail if we happened to carry it in our pockets.
The Classics are part of the official vacuum cleaner to suck up all the dollars it can. A plastic where one deposits those green bills and then cannot take them out, only buy in the stores and gas stations managed by the same owner of those cards. I’m going over all that while I wait outside the Harris Brothers. But I also think about how inefficient the regime on this Island is to carry out any task, even one that interests it so urgently, such as getting the face of Lincoln and Washington out of our pockets.
“The only thing they are good for is repressing,” a friend tells me every time I complain about official plans that were inaugurated with great fanfare and a few weeks later no longer work. Finally it’s my turn to deposit the money that will end up moving the Lada that will take my friend’s daughter to the Palace of Marriages. It’s been two hours since I started in line. I have been lucky. Another nearby location where the same service was previously provided has been closed for weeks.
The employee looks doubtfully at each bill I hand her. Not even the US Federal Reserve Board examines these papers so closely. If anyone has something written with a pen, it is discarded. If Franklin’s face is too wrinkled, they don’t accept it. If Hamilton has some folds that cross his gaze, rejected. So much need to have dollars and so much squeamishness to accept them, I mentally complain. Finally I pass the test, deposit the money and the woman hands me a voucher showing that the operation has been completed.
I call my friend. “Tell your daughter to rent the suit because the gas is almost guaranteed.” I think I’ll bring some rice to throw at the wedding anyway. A tablespoon or two, no more.
*This article was originally published on the 14 y medio blog, with the title: Dollars, Classic card and a Havana without tourists.
