CAMAGÜEY

I told you in the blog entry before that hard currency in cuba is very sought after. People make very little money working for the government for example a psychologist makes around 20 CUC per month, a doctor around 30-40, an architect around 30.

Now we have a lot of intelligent people working their asses off and barely getting enough money to survive let alone having even the slightest bit of luxury.

Cubans are well-known for their creativity when it comes to making money or getting things that are very hard to get. For example: the main income of a lot of doctors are not the 30 CUC they get from the government. They also don’t work as jineteros so how do they do it? They close their doctor’s office let’s say at 4pm. Now if you need medical help, have money but don’t want to wait you call the doctor and get an immediate appointment. So from 4pm until 7pm he works as a private doctor for the people who have money (Usually people with relatives in other countries). Of course, not all doctors are able to do this.
Bus drivers pick up people on the road and drop them off later. Drivers of state-run taxis turn the taximeter off and give you the ride for the same price or a little less than it would cost with the taximeter. They pay for the gas out of their own pocket but keep the rest.

Not all of them are in a good position to make money under the table. Naturally, some of them quit their ordinary jobs and work now as con artists. This is how we met David and Pavel. David still works in the tourist industry which also explains why he speaks English very well. He’s a good-looking 31-year-old guy with very good socializing skills while Pavel is a 50+? year old architect without a job. Pavel also has a wife and a grown up child.

Onno, a German guy I met at the viazul bus stop in Camagüey- and me went for dinner at the plaza san juan de dios. In a cuban open air bar when David and Pavel approached us. Of course we could have blocked their approach to talk to us and we knew if a Cuban starts to talk with you they are usually after your money. Nevertheless we talked for a bit and i was quite surprised how much David knew about politics etc. in europe. He also liked to bash their government and mentioned multiple times how a lot of Cubans want to get out but are unable to do so because money is lacking. He also boasted about how many famous rappers he knows and showed us videos of his “friends”.

So far so good. We ordered a beer tower and invited them to have a drink. Onno wanted to smoke a cigar but he couldn’t buy any in the bar so Pavel offered to get some – for free – which was a very good move to gain our trust. But as we know, nothing is free. Never ever.

Fast forward one or two hours we went to the Monumento Ingacio Agramonte. David offered to buy a bottle of rum and asked for 12 CUC. Onno and me, we gave him 5 each which should be sufficient.
We thought he would get a bottle of havanna club and a couple of cans of coke but no, he came back wich a cheap 1 CUC rum and two cans of coke and some ice. (We knew it was a cheaper one but didn’t know it was that cheap) After that it was obvious he sacked the change but didn’t really care and the atmosphere was good as well. In the end, the bottle of rum was empty, everything was fine and we made an appointment for the next day at 7pm at the same place.

7pm the next day I really thought about not going but knew if Onno would come he had to deal with them alone. So I went. They were also there except Onno. Fortunately he showed up just a little after the scheduled time. Onno and me discussed how to deal with the situation. We came to the conclusion just to go along with it and see what happens. David promised to bring us to a good restaurant. As we walked along he went to a restaurant, came out a moment later: the only serve chicken.. ok that’s maybe not the right place. Since we are in Cuba that would actually make sense. In state-run restaurants it quite often happens that they run out of ingredients. He went to a different restaurant. After what felt like 5 minutes he came out again and said it would be a good place to eat.

What david did was convincing the waitress to play along with his game and heavily overcharge us. She, and them would get a commission, which was probably 4 CUC each for the guys and 2 for the waitress.
Because she works for a government-run restaurant she probably makes around 10 CUC a month. Which is a really bad salary and that’s why she also agreed to the scam.

Onno, naturally, asked for the menu. David tried to convince us they didn’t have a menu but he would translate what the waitress said. Onno saw there was a menu so he insisted we would get a look at it. David also tried to convince us that we would get a really good deal, only 6 CUC per person because, you know, he is a really good guy. (That would be a good deal for a privately owned tourist restaurant)
But this was a state-run, subventioned restaurant we weren’t supposed to be in. It is illegal for tourists to eat in state-run restaurant, he claimed. So for only 6 cuc we could have a good meal everything included. Of course we would pay more because we were tourists and the restaurant risked a fine if the police saw us. He told us that while we were sitting right next to the open window.

Our orders should have been around 200CUP – that is only 8 CUC on total. We waited about an hour for our food and Onno was getting more and more pissed (sadly snickers aren’t available, either). David tried really hard to keep up a conversation showed videos on his cellphone to keep our moods up. The food came, it was tasty and everything was fine. Or not.

To our advantage Onno and me could speak to each other in german without them understanding. So we made a “plan” how to get out of the situation without making a big scene and without them loosing their face. (How nice from us, isn’t it?)
The waitress brought the bill. 18 CUC, 12 CUC for the tourists and 6 CUC for the Cubans. More often than not Cubans pay less for the very same service and they also make it no secret. It’s just how it is.

Luckily I learned some minor Spanish before my travel and also in Cuba so I went to pay the bill, while Onno made his best effort to distract David and Pavel. I asked the waitress to break down what each meal costs. She tried really hard to get it to make sense but it didn’t really work. I demanded we should pay CUP and not the 18 CUC but what is written on the menu. So the bill was around 200CUP like mentioned before. Of course the waitress also wanted to get commission so she didn’t want us to pay in CUP. I told her i know they want to rip us off and they would each get a commission. She was in a pretty bad position: If she charged us in CUC she would be corrupt and she noticed that I knew. The government prices are fixed and it is illegal for them to change anything, but she still had to pay commission to the jineteros. In the meantime Pavel came to me and asked if there was a problem and why the ordeal was taking so long. Everything is fine, I told him and he went back. In the end we paid for the food in CUP but gave her huge tip. She was genuinely thankful.

The best thing about the story is when we saw the faces of the guys when I told them I paid in CUP. It went from pretty happy (since they thought they would get a free meal and commission) to infuriated in an instant. He claimed the waitress is a liar and how much he hates liars. Surprisingly they still tried to convince us we both are victims, they make a really good example of persistence. This this was the moment when Onno couldn’t take it any more and confronted them directly. But the would still not admit to anything. So we politely told them to get lost and went our way.

If you feel sorry for the jineteros because they are poor, don’t be! The problem with the jineteros is they rip the system apart. If a guy who rips off tourists makes 3 times as much in a month as a doctor there is really something wrong with the whole system.
The fact that the earn more than hard-working people makes a lot of people quit their jobs as doctors etc. and get them into the jinetero business. This is also why prices increase every year and why the difference between poor and rich is getting bigger and bigger in Cuba. As travellers we should by no means support these people.

By the way: If someone wants to write David a message here’s his e-mail address: dany07@correocuba.cu

SANTA CLARA

In santa clara I met some people at the che guevara mausoleum.That’s the place where his remains are supposed to be after the US handed them out.

We strolled around had a super greasy pizza, drank a beer during a heavy thunderstorm and had really good dinner in a state-run restaurant. After that, we went to a “cultural center” (like the Rote Fabrik in Zurich). They have a drag show every saturday and a lot of live bands, cabarets etc on other days. When we went there was a rock night.
Sounds cool right? Well they should have called it High School Death Metal Night. It was quite funny actually because the bands tried to give their best but it just didn’t work out. Maybe it was the play?

Maybe the crowd?

or the type of drinks?

Make your own guess.

Of course there’s not a huge metal scene in the salsa and raeggeton dominated Cuba. But it’s still nice to see some diversity.

After the concert we were barely able to save ourselves from the hordes of cuban people who tried to give us salsa lessons, bring us to the best club in town or just have a random chat about their “mini schatzeli” in Meilen. Nevertheless, we survived and finally made it home.

GETTING OUT OF CUBA

Getting out of Cuba wasn’t exactly as easy as I thought. There were two reasons for that: The first reason was hurricane Matthew, which hovered in the Caribbean sea between Curacao and the Dominican Republic. The second reason was the utter incompetence of Insel Air.
On friday the 30.9.2016 I wanted to fly to Curacao. I went to the airport but almost didn’t get there because the car broke down and the engine wouldn’t start anymore.

I still made it to the airport just to see my flight was cancelled.

No big deal, that happens sometimes. Insel Air has two flights per week from Havanna to Curacao, one on Monday and another one on Friday. At that time I didn’t even know of hurricane matthew because it’s really hard to get reliable information in Cuba. But even the guy at the information desk nor anybody else could tell us why the flight was cancelled. Oh, and did I mention Insel Air has no office in Havanna? Nevermind, I’ll just go and spend the weekend in Matanzas, I said to myself and that’s what I did.
Next Monday my super host dad in Havana called the airport for me to check whether the flight was going or not. Yes, it was. They confirmed. So I went to the airport. After standing 2.5 hours!! in the line to check in, they stopped checking people in. They managed to check in around 25 people per hour at two counters (I am not kidding!). I have never ever encountered people working so slowly and unprofessionally as in Cuba. This was at 13:30 and the flight was supposed to go at 14:15.
People, myself included, got really mad at that time. There was still a long queue of people waiting to get checked in. 15minutes later an Insel Air representative came to inform us the plane was still in Curacao and the flight is “most probably” (she’s the representative, why doesn’t she have a clue??) going to be cancelled as well. Just for the record: It would have been possible to fly around hurricane matthew at that time because it was about to hit Haiti and Cuba. But she couldn’t tell more. She couldn’t give us a phone number to call or any other information. In the end that flight didn’t go and I, of course, also missed the flight from Curacao to Medellin on the following friday. But because I didn’t want to stay in Cuba any longer I just booked the next possible flight: To Bogota.