"In Cuba there's nothing, but you can find anything."
26 Sept. — 2 Oct. 2024
Hola, welcome, y gracias for being here.
Just one scoop this week, amigos, based on a topic Yoani Sánchez covered recently on her podcast, Cafecito Informativo. I’ll take you on a short walk around a Cuban marketplace and tell you a related story about a Cuban man who really, really didn’t want to buy a pink toilet.
A note about Cafecito. Somehow, Yoani manages to crank out a daily episode despite the obstacles the regime throws in her way. Internet shutdowns, selective power outages, plain clothes agents stationed in her lobby, the occasional televised “character assassination” and denouncement on state-controlled TV.
The government blocks Cafecito inside Cuba, so listeners there have to use VPNs to access the show. But fans across the world, including this one in a little town in New Hampshire, tune in regularly. Brava, Yoani. Brava.
Hasta la semana que viene . . .
Ana
Cuba’s Bizarre Bazaars
In Cuba there’s nothing, but you can find everything . . .?
I heard that head-scratcher of a saying during my second trip back to Cuba in 2012. I was baffled at first. But a friend in Havana told me a story—about a toilet—that he thought would help me understand. The riddle and my friend’s toilet tale reminded me of the Cuban tendency to joke about the hardships they face each day.
My friend had been renovating his bathroom, slowly and painstakingly ferreting out supplies, toiling after his long work days, learning about plumbing and tiling, dreaming about the little white bathroom he hoped to have one day. He’d found only one toilet in all his searching. And it was pink.
He knew he wouldn’t find a decent toilet in “official” state-run stores—they were perpetually out of stock, or the toilets would be old, ugly, possibly damaged, or a weird color he didn’t want to look at every day. He’d been checking his black market contacts for some time and had finally found someone, who knew someone, who knew someone, who had a new toilet—an expensive one, but modern, new. And white.
He had had to barter something—I can’t remember now what—with the seller to seal the deal, because he couldn’t afford the price the guy was demanding. The whole process was slow and tortuous, he explained, but Cubans were used to it.
The head-scratching riddle—about not having anything but finding everything—mirrors the distorted reality Cubans confront each time they try to buy something in their centralized, planned economy. It’s a system plagued by low productivity, high inefficiency, and workplace pilfering—among other ailments. Consumers rarely find what they need, when they need it, in official state stores. But they are resourceful, dogged, and skilled at the hunt. They know how to find someone, somewhere, who will probably know where to find the item they’re looking for.
In this awkward toilet tale, someone probably stole a toilet from that state-run store or warehouse where they worked, maybe with help from someone else who’d get a cut of the proceeds when Thief One found a buyer on the black market. Or the seller may have purchased the toilet legally and held on to it, waiting for a buyer desperate enough to pay the much higher price he’d demand.
This parallel market phenomenon not only still exists, it’s expanding, as Yoani Sácnhez reports in her 26 Sept. Cafecito. She focuses on the flourishing black markets found across Havana just outside the state-controlled agro-markets, where people go to buy fruits, vegetables, and the occasionally available animal protein.
“One thing is what happens inside and another is what happens outside [of the state-run agros],” she says. The shelves inside these official markets are bare, or have poor quality produce. But outside these markets, “you’ll find the beating heart of commercial life, where black market vendors offer everything from razors to cigarettes, bunches of onions or garlic, even the little plastic bags you need to buy items inside the official market.”
The black market vendors aren’t limited by the regime’s regulations and price controls, like the “official” vendors inside the markets. The black market vendors do have to worry about the police, though. Both buyers and sellers run the risk of fines or arrest when they make their deals. It’s tricky, and the illegal vendors have ways of signaling to each other when the police are near. But sometimes plain clothes agents show up and people get caught.
Yoani explains that this bizarre bazaar isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom of a systemic illness. “The state has implemented so many controls and limitations, that people try escape them by trading illegally,” Sánchez says. It’s Cuba’s economic system that generates the illegality, she says, through its policies. “Cubans have dealt with this for at least 60 years.”
“Re-selling products purchased in state-run stores on the black market is a way to make a living for many people,” Sánchez says. “This is how we get our daily bread, folks, because a dysfunctional system, in terms of productivity, organizationally, and retail management, generates these distortions.
“So people go to the official markets, buy a few items . . . But they must buy outside the official market if they want to find what they need. Now, watch out for the prices, those will be high, because it’s the law of supply and demand that runs that system, if not the law of the jungle.”
This daily “foraging,” as another Havana friend describes the daily hunt for food—and, yes, that new white toilet you’ve dreamed of—takes time, energy, patience, connections, and a lot of guts. It’s a system that generates stress, causes hunger, disillusionment, great frustration, and depletes people of hope.
And for 60+ years, it hasn’t changed in any meaningful way. The regime may toy with capitalist elements during especially tough times, but it keeps the economy in an ideological straitjacket that simply won’t let it breathe.
What irony. A communist system that has forced its citizens to become resourceful, skilled, risk-taking—even law-breaking—capitalists to survive.
That legal, accessible, and reasonably priced gallon of milk at the Cumberland Farms has never looked so good.