Cocotaxi Ride: 5 to 20¥ per kilometer Café Cubano: 40 to 100¥
Tukola: 2 to 5¥
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Note that all are given as a range. There’s no fixed pricing. The lower price is about what a Cuban will pay, the upper end is what is offered to tourists. Everyone else pays somewhere in the middle.mits can be obtained by paying local law enforcement the right fees. No one can afford all the fees, so the restaurant owners pick and choose, hoping to find a combination works for them—accepting restricted hours but secur- ing the right to serve non-soy Polo al Ajillo, for example, or giving up beef for the right to host receptions. Some restaurateurs get creative, enhancing their menus with items not specifically regulated, such as certain types of fish and local fruit, or featuring specialty drinks. If nothing else the regulations ensure that each paladare is unique.
Cubans get most of their groceries from government bodegas. Back when things were bad and everyone was on short rations, there were armed guards and no options on what you bought—they gave you your calorie allot- ment in whatever they had on hand. Usually soy. It was pretty grim before the government imported processors able to emulate real food, and even then it was not good. The government, with the help of a few entrepreneurs, probably avoided food riots by giving priority to import- ing and distributing spices—real garlic, bay, laurel, cumin, and even lime juice. The soy was still soy, but when the cooks at home were done with it, it was Cuban soy. These days the guards are gone, and the bodegas look more like corporate grocery stores. Everything is government brand, of course, but there’s variety and no rationing. A more recent development is the tiendas. Or, I should say, legally licensed tiendas, as people were bartering, trad- ing, and selling back when capitalism was punishable by death. Tiendas are independent, family-owned markets. They’re allowed to sell certain government-brand basics, but they mostly deal in local items—produce, crafts, what have you—and they will still trade you a few eggs for avo- cados from your greenhouse. They’re not as regulated as the restaurants, as they’re no threat to the resorts.
I snagged Fumando’s write-ups of the Martinez fam- ily, the Batista family, the Zobop, the Vory, the Triad, and all the other colorful players infesting Cuba’s underbelly. It’s attached somewhere down the line, so I won’t go into detail here. If you listened to President Martinez, you’d think Cuba is first and foremost in the war on pi- rates, smugglers, drug dealers, and metahuman traffick- ers in the Caribbean League. He’s got the trids of pirate ships being sunk and slavers executed to prove it. But the cold fact is, he doesn’t care about Haiti, St. Croix, the Bahamas, or any of the rest. And as long as they pay their fees he’s not too curious about the smugglers or pirates, either. Everything he does is to keep Cuba—and President Martinez—in the spotlight, able to sway public opinion and influence League policies and decisions. If you have the money and the cojones, you can do what you want in Cuba. Except—and this is vital—anything that will hurt the tourist industry. For all its progress and recovery, Cuba still has a long climb ahead of it. Agri- culture, industry, infrastructure are all just getting back on their feet. And right now the economic engine that makes all of the progress and restoration possible is tourism. Screw with that, and you’ve screwed yourself.
HAVANA
POSTED BY: FUMANDO PIRATED BY: KANE
Havana is truly the Pearl of the Caribbean, with beaches more inviting than the Riviera, architecture more inspir- ing than Madrid, and culture steeped in the best tradi- tions of a hundred peoples. Of course, where there is light there is also darkness, and the darkness of Havana is the corruption and power struggles that hinder the city attaining its full glory. But the political shadow is not sufficient to prevent people from all over the world from seeking out the city’s beauty and the opportuni- ties it offers.
Havana’s architecture reflects the diverse cultural roots of its people. Stand anywhere and you will see buildings of Spanish colonial, post-modern, Moorish, Neo-Classical, and Art-Deco designs—along with build- ings that blend those and others—giving the city an ambiance that cannot be matched anywhere. New con- struction is not required to follow any particular school of design, but new buildings must harmonize with the older ones around them. And the older buildings are be- ing restored to their original state with meticulous atten- tion to detail. The only exceptions are the office build- ings and warehouses constructed in the Soviet style when Russia most heavily influenced Cuban life. Those buildings are being repurposed as hotels and casinos. To better serve the tourist industry, the dreary industri- al blocks are being transformed with Romanesque col- umns, Spanish arches, elegant balconies, and beautiful local tiles artfully inlaid walls and ceilings, so that they can be ignored by the oblivious tourist masses.
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What does he have against tourists?>
Coral Reefer>
He’s pissed tourists don’t come here to stand in awe of Cuban art and culture. They get off the boat for the sole purpose of enjoying themselves with childish things, like cigars they believe were rolled on the thighs of beautiful Cuban women, before getting back on the boat to their dreary wageslave lives. I’m just glad that some of their money stays here, whether they wanted it to or not.>
KaneMusic in Cuba has evolved, but the island still has a sound that is all its own. Trova, with its poetic lyrics and intricately fanciful guitar playing, is considered the first uniquely Cuban music, but son cubano, blending the driving, syncopated rhythms of Africa with Latin melo- dies, emerged soon after. These two forms, progenitors of salsa and bolero, become part of any music brought to Cuba—from Catholic hymns to troll drinking songs to nursery rhymes to goth rock. Son and trova have each
developed numerous subgenres, including seis son and novisma mondo trova, but neither has lost its identity.
The global appeal and influence of Cuban music is a major reason tourists come to Cuba. And tourists are the lifeblood of the island. Massive corporate cruise ships deposit thousands every day—some in Havana Bay, more in corporate beaches and resorts in East Havana. These tourists pay premium prices for severely limited quantities of Cuban rum and cigars or for authentic Cu- ban cuisine and nightlife. They spend even more, some losing fortunes, gambling at Sports Town or in the gov- ernment casinos surrounding Revolution Square.
The popular perception is that Cuba’s economy de- pends on piracy and the black market. It is an open secret that all (or almost all) of the island’s laws are very flexible if the right fees are paid. For some reason, tourists find this brush with crime exciting—provided the crime doesn’t af- fect them directly, of course. But while some might imag- ine Cuba is only a few steps from sinking into the lawless chaos of Haiti, things are not as uncontrolled as they’re rumored to be. While the only obvious arm of law enforce- ment in Cuba is the National Police in their emerald-green uniforms (augmented by the black and gold of Knight Er- rant in Havana and environs), there are less obvious gov- ernment agencies at work. For the most part, criminals know that if they pay the right fees, they can operate to a certain degree outside the law. But they also know there are serious consequences for exceeding certain limits.
Organized crime also plays a role in law enforce- ment—or at least keeping order—particularly since Pres- ident Ray Martinez came into power. There is a con- stant ebb and flow of power plays and turf wars going on beneath the surface of Cuban society, but all parties involved understand the concept of a goose with gold- en eggs and keep anything that might disrupt the flow of tourist money and keep their struggles covert. While certain crimes against tourists are tolerated—selling counterfeit cigars, adjustments to the roulette wheel or the baccarat deck, etc.—anyone who gets too greedy or too violent runs the risk of being brought down by their colleagues before the police get to them.
President Ray Martinez’s approach to law enforce- ment has been effective. Statistics for all types of crime, particularly those that affect tourists directly, are all dra- matically lower than they were when Enrique was pres- ident.