Yesterday, my wife and I pulled off quite a feat given the current context in Cuba. We left the house with only 600 pesos in cash—well under a dollar—and returned home with nearly half of that still. I suggest you first check out this post I wrote a few days ago, which serves as an introduction to the problem. Here, in summary, I will merely note that digital money has practically lost all its value, to the point that cash must now be bought at an exchange rate hovering around 30% relative to its digital version. This purchase can be literal, or it can manifest as a digital payment for a product with that same 30% surcharge, which, for all intents and purposes, is an aberration but still better than going without your purchase. This is: if I want to buy an item that costs 1,000 pesos and I don't have the cash on hand, I can at least buy it for 1,300 Cuban pesos directly from my card.
The lines at banks are utterly nonsensical, filled with vulnerable people trying to withdraw a little money to buy the day's food, who show up at dawn and often leave empty-handed. Added to this market "gimmick" is inflation: 600 pesos are the equivalent of 4 pastries or 3 fruit shakes, and they won't buy you 2 canned sodas. Then, the transportation issue was—from a practical standpoint—our main handicap, because moving even a relatively short distance was a step that could easily swallow up all our cash in a single round trip. And on top of all this, my wife—with our two children—and I had to split up because we had different errands to run. Her mission was to buy the shoes for the start of the school year, and mine was to pick up some liters of olive oil.
On my wife's side, she ran into an immediate obstacle: at the establishment where we have historically bought our shoes because of their somewhat affordable prices—the so-called "SEARS" in the Marianao municipality, which still bears the name from when it operated as a subsidiary of the historic and eventually ill-fated American chain, before the Cuban Revolution—they were not accepting digital payments. In other words, she ran straight into the syndrome of the moment. But with the desperate pleas of a mother, she managed to get another, smaller retailer to accept payment that way, with the practical catch that the products would carry no warranty.
We had split the 600 pesos in cash as follows: 400 for my wife, and 200 for me. With the main problem solved, all for her turned to the gamble of returning home just with those 400 pesos. The minimum fare was 200 pesos per person, and since she had to pay for three, the total would have been 600 pesos. Likewise, through more desperate maternal pleading, she got the driver of an electric tricycle to accept a 300-peso transfer to complete the 600-peso cost of three fares. After that, the day smiled on her a bit more when she caught a bus that dropped her off two stops from our university residence. That final stretch was even more comfortable on a university vehicle whose driver recognized her. That is to say, she returned home with 100 pesos in cash and with her assigned problem solved.
In my case, I start from the math that led me to buy olive oil as an alternative to the vegetable cooking oil we have always kept in our family pantry. Given the entire inflationary spiral, if we take that one liter can sometimes cost 5,000 pesos in cash, with the "tax" implied either by acquiring that cash or buying it online, it ends up costing me 6,500 pesos per liter. That is why, when I saw an olive oil offer priced at 5,100 pesos, with digital payment and a discount, I went for it. When you run the numbers, I'm saving well over 1,000 pesos per liter, thereby boosting my card balance.
But I had to pick up the purchase at the seller's warehouse, which is extremely distant—to say the least—from my university; even from the point where my wife made her purchase. Cash-stripped, I had no choice but to appeal to the inconsistent kindness of drivers of state-owned cars traveling without their windows rolled up—which I hail at "strategic" points like traffic lights or yield signs—, sporadic and inexpensive buses that one can sometimes connect with—the oil blockade imposed by the Trump administration has brought the operability of Cuba's public transportation system down to zero, and it was never good, but it always helped somewhat—, and my capacity to walk long distances, like the roughly 6 kilometers I walked yesterday. With all these variables, I only spent 40 pesos after returning home. I put the focus more on the positive aspects of the outing than on the negative: getting the math right and, ultimately, socially resolving the problems that go beyond the numbers.
Source for the cover image, generated with through GPT.
