Shop ´till you drop...

Blame it on unreliability of resources, price of imported goods, occasional indifference shown by staff to customer service, (variable to poor) quality of goods and the necessity to queue for everything: Cuba is not a consumerist society. Where we either revel in it or begrudge the time lost in the detour to the high street or supermarket, for Cubans it is one of the most trying of daily tasks that has to be met with an unbelievable amount of patience and flexibility but almost never excitement or joy.

Before I come back to the reasons it’s worth noting that things have not always been as bad as they are now. Of course they have been worse – most notably in the early to mid 1990’s – but they’ve also been much better. Isis talks wistfully of the days before the ‘special period’ when there was unlimited petroleum, tinned peaches and condensed milk. Then she talks of those born in the 1990’s and pities their not knowing the good days. Cubans of a certain age have lived through an awful lot of hardship and change and so far there is not much hope of a swift return to the times of plenty. Though the provision of government rations (including limited food and clothing) and its housing plan means that virtually no one is actually starving these days in Cuba, things are not easy – and nowhere is this more evident than in the daily necessity of buying stuff. A few observations on what makes shopping such a chore follow.

·         The unreliability of resources

Things may have improved since the ‘90s but since Cuba remains under the US embargo or ‘bloqueo’, still faces a massive and crippling debt, is still a ‘developing’ country and is still an island – thus it’s sometimes a miracle that anything gets through the borders at all! Tinned fruit, tinned tomatoes, Levis, Adidas, fruit juice etc can be discovered at a push (if you’re able or prepared to pay for them) but the list of what cannot be found is far longer and security of supply is virtually non-existent.  

As a result of such insecurities, Cuba has learnt to produce a lot itself – sugar, rice, fruit and vegetables for example, but the list is by no means exhaustive and even those goods it includes cannot be produced to the quantity required to satisfy the population.  Furthermore it does not extend to non-food goods. Thus the result is simple: many products cannot and do not get into the country or the towns and certainly not to little villages. I had to search a full week before I could find any coffee in Alamar and it was not until I went into Havana that I managed to track some down. Of course food security is not so insecure on the tourist trail. Flock to visitor enclaves such as Varadero on the Atlantic coast and Trinidad on the Caribbean and bare shelves seem to be heavily policed against – almost as if the government were putting on a façade for their international visitors. Hard to believe? Sadly not.

Our experience has so far taught us that when you see something you want: buy it! Dawdling here simply ends in tears. We’d been hunting for an umbrella for days in both Havana and the prime beach resort Varadero to no avail. When we found some shops that looked like umbrellas might be amongst the items normally stocked we were either told with a kind smile: ‘if only’, or just given a look as if to say ‘you’ve so much to learn!’ 

In addition to the unreliability of resources is the fact that you just don’t have a hope in hell of finding some things. Take for example the daily newspaper, Granma. If you’re a tourist wanting to read the (heavily biased) noticias you need to get ‘lucky’ and stumble across someone sat on the corner of a street selling it. If they see you first, you’ll end up paying at least 20 times more than its worth because you have the words foreigner/CUC written across your forehead. That and the fact that newsagents simply do not exist, and the government retains tight controls on what can and cannot be read. Unless you’re staying in an upscale hotel the only option if you’ve run out of reading material is to try and learn Spanish by reading Love in the time of cholera or to go pick some texts glorifying the socialist revolution. Staring out of the window and watch the world go by is often easier.

·         Choice

This has to be one of the very few remaining places where McDonalds has yet to arrive and where Coca Cola is less popular and scarcer than the national tu kola drink. It surely won’t last for ever but for now what Cubans eat, drink and consume is strictly guarded by the government and therefore resists American influence as much as it can. Window shopping is educational rather than entertaining, and often for want of a better word, depressing.

One of the most interesting areas for me is the Cuban supermarkets. So far we’ve only found one which could reasonably be called a supermarket: a large-ish white space with isles and shelves with a limited range of goods from long life milk to juice to coffee and vegetable oil. There is one or at the most two brands for each and no fresh food to speak of. That’s OK because there are farmers markets (if you can find them) in every town as well as butchers (or stalls with piles of meat), fishmongers (if you’re lucky) and here one minute gone the next outlets that sell goats’ milk and fast food, but the purest ‘supermarket’ of course comes nowhere near to resembling what we in the ‘developed’ world would think of a supermarket, metro or corner shop. Roadside ‘Panamerican’ stalls stock similar goods (one of everything – from biscuits and fizzy drinks to deodorant) for sale in CUC which help make life tolerable for the unaccustomed visitor, but they’re not much fun for locals: soap, nestle ice cream and a bottle of rum become real luxuries when they’re sold in divisa (CUC) by the corner shops.

·         The price of goods

This brings us onto the cost of the shop, though I’ve written a fair amount on this so won’t dwell. Basically, imported goods including toiletries, decent alcohol, tinned and cupboard staple foodstuffs, clothes, shoes, electronics etc are all sold in CUC, making them comparatively expensive for the foreigner and positively off-limits for the average Cuban – if there is such a thing?! If you want to buy a pair of trainers and you earn $18CUC per month, you’ve got to save a fair old while to afford the $50CUC price tag. If you want to buy a computer, TV or hair dryer – you’re going to need to get creative. Prices are vastly inflated and thus completely unrealistic. Somehow people do get there – whether it’s because of loans from the government, remittances from family in the USA, second hand trade, black market acquisition etc – but it’s not easy. 

As a foreigner however if you’re carrying moneda nacional you can get some bargains. Mini food stops spring up outside people’s houses selling everything from ham sandwiches to fruit milkshakes and pina coladas. Helen and I walked down the main street to the beach at lunch time one day in the mood to give everything a try and managed to acquire two fresh pina coladas, 2 little paper cones of peanuts, strange but tasty corn fritters, a bag of popcorn, soya yoghurt, what we think is a slab of peanut butter (saved for emergencies) and a handful of a yummy fruit whose name I forget and I don’t think we have in the UK -  all for under a pound. Now we’re on the tourist trail however such feasting in national pesos is a rarity and you have to be quick on your toes – buying food straight after locals is a good trick, so you can see how much they pay before they add a few zeroes onto the price.

·         The indifference of staff

For a country wishing to entice more foreign visitors and indeed hoping to grow its economy it’s a wonder they’re by and large yet to invent the concept of customer service. Seriously, the number of times we’ve tried to buy anything from a bottle of water to a dinner or even a night in a hotel and been met with a look of scorn has meant that when we find someone helpful and sympathetic, we find ourselves jumping for joy. Fortunately this doesn’t include everything, with the notable exception being the casas particulares (essentially B&B’s) we’ve been staying with on the island which have, almost without exception, been run by wonderfully friendly people.

Once we turned up at a hotel though – the only night we’ve not stayed in a Casa - only to find the booking had been confused and we’d asked for the night before instead. When we apologised to the particularly unhappy receptionist we then rather predictably tried to ask – still wearing rucksacks and after a long and delayed journey - whether she would have a room for tonight instead. She simply looked at us as if to say ‘do I look like I’m running a hotel!?’ It was then a fair wait before she begrudgingly suggested there was one room we could share, but it would definitely not be available the next night. Needless to say we went back to staying in the casas the next day!

·         The quality of goods

When it comes to quality you have to qualify what you’re talking about. If it’s apples, don’t get your hopes up, whereas if you’re looking for a tasty selection of root veg or some arts and crafts to take home you should have more luck. Cuba has gone from producing almost nothing for the tourist market to a burgeoning street stall artisan sector which sells everything from wooden afro-Caribbean carvings to kitchy paintings and silver plated jewellery. I’m still not convinced there is anything I like enough so far to carry around Costa Rica for 2 weeks in order to get it home, but inevitably this sector takes some people’s fancy. When it comes to food though quality cannot be taken for granted. Any space I have left is going to be reserved for Cigars – for which Cuba has earned a spot as number one in the world - so get your orders in!

·         The queue

Understanding the queue in Cuba is a rite of passage. To the untrained eye, the crowd milling around at the bus stop, the group waving fans whilst waiting at the bank, or even the frustrated masses sat down on the floor at immigration look like an unorganised gaggle of nationals. Believe it or not however they’re almost without exception organised into a rigid albeit fluid queue. One look to the past helps explain how the phenomenon of the queue has become a daily occupation for most Cubans.

This paragraph is an extract from an account of ‘A Visit to Cuba’ written by a Jesuit priest in 1971. It’s a fantastically vivid and well written account of a trip made and has been fascinating to read given the many changes and consistencies between today and 40 years ago. These few lines on the queue are worth sharing (specific details of where the extract is taken from to follow in future blog post):

“The most remarkable queues I encountered were those outside the few restaurants that remain open to the public in Havana. To get a meal, one has to start queuing the day before. A ticket is then issued entitling one to return on the morrow to eat but, since the quantity of tickets issued usually exceeds the amount of food, it is advisable to return early the following day - hence a second queue. If the supply holds good when one's turn comes, one eats or puts the meal into a bag to carry home. “

This was written in 1971 and though the situation is not so extreme in 2011 you can still cannot avoid the queue and have to learn to understand it if you want to get anything done. And so how do you do it and make it look so painless? Well, you just rock up to the crowd and ask who is ‘El ultimo?’- the last person. Sometimes you need to ask a few times before anyone takes any notice of you but when you do get a response you need to clock who it was or in my case stick to them like a stamp. If you’re extra sharp, you’ll double your back by asking who comes before them. Sometimes I’ve been in a queue and taken my finger off the pulse only to look up and have lost the person I was behind – either because they’ve given up or because they’ve already been seen. You can avoid being once again in the no-man’s-land by checking down the chain.

Despite these reasons and many more that make shopping such a difficult and unrewarding experience most Cubans accept this reality with admirable cheer. Again quoting from the account above, “In spite of the inconveniences, however, queues are happy places where one can still savour the humour for which Cubans are famous. I often stood in one to chat with the people. One joke doing the rounds went as follows: It is the year 2000. A Cuban boy is reading a history book on the heroic days of the revolution and comes up against the word ‘queue’. He asks: ‘Daddy, what is a ‘queue’?’ ‘Ah, my son, those were things we used to do in the early days when there were many shortages. If we wanted a pair of shoes, for example, we would form a queue. When you got to the top of the line and if there were any shoes left, you were then entitled to buy a pair.’ ‘Daddy’ ‘Yes, my son.’ ‘What are shoes?’”

Thankfully the sight of a man or woman without shoes is a rareity...but the queue lives on!