[Trey Brister]

Havana Hustle

Cuba’s New Socialist Man learns to wheel and deal

Damien Cave




I met Pablo in December at a rooftop bar offering cheap cocktails, live salsa, and an expansive view of Havana Harbor. Pablo -- his name and the names of other Cubans in this story have been changed to protect them from punishment -- was 28 years old, a budding capitalist with a strong code of ethics. He laid fiery scorn on the city’s jineteros, male "jockeys" who hustle tourists for tips and commissions. He mocked their aggressive approach -- "Hey, you need cigars? Una chica?" -- and insisted they were ruining Cuba. Sure, Pablo himself found restaurants for tourists when they asked, and at our request he led two friends and me to a dark, lusty nightclub (appropriately named Las Vegas), where he earned $15 off our $56 tab. But for the most part, Pablo supported his sick mother and younger sister through more legitimate means. Instead of pushing overpriced restaurants, tobacco, women, or drugs, he sold his own paintings, Crayola-bright Cubascapes that tourists bought for $20 or more.


Pablo reveled in the fact that he taught himself to paint, then learned English to increase sales. "I’m different," he told me. "I always earn money without hurting anyone."


Five months later, on a sweaty spring night, Pablo repeats this claim. And with me, he’s always lived up to it, going so far as to return commissions culled from our shared meals and drinks. But a lot has changed since December, and it’s not at all clear that Pablo and others like him will manage to hold onto their scruples. Cuba today is wracked with silent fear. In the wake of a massive spring crackdown on independent thought and action -- Castro has tossed nearly 80 dissidents in jail, executed three boat hijackers, shuttered home-based businesses, and closed at least one popular discotheque -- few feel secure. Jineteros now whisper or quickly demand dollars. Educated Cubans hide American books at the first sign of a visitor. Black marketeers sweat the sales they need to survive. It’s as if Havana were the setting of a metropolitan hide and seek, with all the citizens holding their breath to keep from being found by Fidel.


Amid such suffocation, nearly everyone must consider an immediate shift in course -- especially in Cuba, where an estimated half of all retail transactions take place in the black market. But to understand how today’s oppressive atmosphere fits into not just Cuba’s present but its past and future, there is perhaps no better place to look than the world of jineterismo. Because they work in the streets under the nose of the regime, jineteros have become Cuba’s ultimate evolvers, hurricane-quick adapters who bob and weave whenever political muscle appears. Mostly in their teens and 20s, they offer a vital glimpse into both what people are being forced to do today and what they’ll likely pursue tomorrow.


Neither insight is encouraging. In more ways than one, Castro is turning would-be capitalists into criminals. At this point, not even Pablo is the man he used to be.


Black and Gray Markets

Pablo’s relationship to jineterismo, Fidel, and capitalism includes fits and starts, triumphs, trials, and plenty of errors. But in each case, Castro made the first move.


The pattern started in 1993. At the time, Pablo was 18 and Cuba was dying. Without the Soviet Union’s oil and its $4 billion in annual aid, the island could barely function. Blackouts darkened the Cuban night. Malnutrition returned to the countryside, and inflation skyrocketed. Cuba was doomed, Andres Oppenheimer declared in his 1993 book, Castro’s Final Hour; it would soon disintegrate into chaos.


But stories of Castro’s demise have always been greatly exaggerated. Suddenly, he let loose the reins. Self-employment in dozens of formerly black market occupations became legal. Such activity has been a part of Cuba’s economy since Spanish rule, when officials earned low salaries and were expected to pad their incomes through corruption. Because the post-Soviet black market had swelled to politically threatening proportions, Castro decided to co-opt it.


He also gave his blessing to dollars. Once outlawed as the currency of imperialism, greenbacks suddenly became not just accepted but necessary. Without American cash, it was nearly impossible to obtain shampoo, appliances, decent shoes, and other items the state could no longer provide.


The economists who convinced the government to accept minimal reforms said they wanted to give markets an active role, "neither exclusive nor dominant." Castro, meanwhile, wanted only a tightly limited infusion of free enterprise. "We will have to improve and perfect socialism, make it efficient but not destroy it," he said in 1993. "The illusion that capitalism is going to solve our problems is an absurd and crazy chimera for which the masses will pay dearly."


This ambivalence created gnarled, often schizophrenic markets. While a significant part of the regime’s survival strategy depended on opening the country to tourism, for example, restaurants and bed and breakfasts were not allowed to advertise or to hire anyone but immediate family. The former prohibition essentially created jineterismo: Without advertising, one-on-one marketing to the masses became the best way to drum up business.


Pablo -- a trim 5 feet, 9 inches, looking more like a shortstop than a businessman -- still recalls the day he raised the issue with his family. He had just finished school, and rather than work for the state he wanted to try earning dollars on the streets. His family needed cash. He was the only man in the house. His mother was often bedridden with severe arthritis, his younger sister and her daughter were still in school, and Pablo, as a black man without political connections or an appropriate degree, would never be able to get a tourism job that offered legal access to dollars. Becoming a jinetero, he argued, was the only option.


At first his mother and sister rejected the idea. "They didn’t want me to do it," Pablo tells me in his simple concrete house on the outskirts of Havana, where he still lives with his mother, sister, and niece. "They thought it was dangerous. They thought I’d be arrested."


Eventually, though, his family relented. The cutbacks in food and services provided by the state were simply too much to bear. Besides, they figured, when the government has the cojones to ban Cubans from entering hotels and tourist restaurants, why treat the law as sacred?


Business was relatively good at first. The number of tourists visiting the island increased by 15 to 20 percent a year throughout the mid-’90s, and tourist-focused businesses took off. By the end of 1995, according to government statistics, Cuba had more than 208,000 licensed independent workers (called cuenta propistas), 64,000 of them in Havana. As a result, young men like Pablo, who always made sure to tuck in his shirts and look clean, had little trouble satisfying the foreign, sunscreened hordes while earning at least twice the salary of a Cuban doctor (400 pesos, or about $16, a month). More impressively, they managed to do it without the widespread violence and crime usually associated with informal hustling in countries such as Jamaica. Pablo, it seems, wasn’t the only one trying to "make money without hurting anyone."


Until 1996. That’s when Castro rewrote the market’s rules. Fearing the genie he’d unleashed, and with the economy improving, Fidel "rectified" the situation. A series of new laws demanded everything from the re-registration of the self-employed to income taxes that often topped actual income. Nearly every entrepreneur suffered. Within two years, the number of registered independent workers dropped by nearly half. According to Ted Henken, a Cuba specialist at the City University of New York (CUNY), by 2000 only 200 home-based restaurants (paladares) were registered and in business on the entire island, a decrease of more than 85 percent.


Pablo felt the impact more immediately than most. By the summer of 1997, he’d grown desperate. He couldn’t find a state job that paid enough, and the open friend-liness required for successful hustling attracted police attention. So Pablo asked his sister Susanna to work with tourists in Varadero, a beach community two hours outside Havana. Pablo knew this meant she would be tempted to sleep with men for money. He knew that jineteras were expected to have sex with their customers. He says that the idea made him nauseous, and that when Susanna agreed to go he hoped she’d be the exception. In any case, with a sick mother to care for and no other source of income, he and his family had no choice. "I was having such a hard time," Pablo says. "I figured maybe she’d be luckier because she’s a woman."


Pablo’s dubious suggestion was hardly unique. During the so-called Special Period of the ’90s, a swift trade in sex tourism began to develop in Cuba, and many women chose to seek out foreign boyfriends instead of Cuban jobs. Unfortunately, Pablo’s sister started at a dangerous time. In addition to the new laws, Pope John Paul II was scheduled to visit Cuba within a few months. Castro accordingly embarked on a moral crusade against prostitution. Two months and one boyfriend after she started, Susanna was arrested. The Italian man she’d befriended couldn’t do her any good. The handful of dollars she’d earned were useless. Without a trial or a lawyer, she received the standard harsh sentence of the time: two years in prison.


When the Pope arrived in January, the streets along his route were as clean as the Vatican’s.