Havana Hustle

Cuba's New Socialist Man learns to wheel and deal

Damien Cave from the August/September 2003 issue

(Page 2 of 5)

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.

Hustlers and Soft Sells

Susanna doesn't seem angry at Pablo today. She refuses to talk about what prison was like, but when we met she and Pablo were joking around about dinner, clothes -- typical sibling banter. If there was a long-term scar from the experience, it didn't show.

For Pablo, though, Susanna's arrest became yet another turning point. If the regime's 1996 crackdown pushed Pablo's sister to the streets, her arrest threw him in the opposite direction. At first, Pablo simply wallowed in sadness and anger. "I cried for like a year," he says. "I went crazy knowing she was in prison because of me." But after several months, the pressure to provide mixed with the regret over his sister pushed him to adjust once more. This time, he focused on a long-term investment: education. By learning English and painting, he hoped to broaden his market.

He aimed to avoid the seedier side of serving tourists, and according to his mother, "He worked very hard." When Pablo showed me a series of notebooks full of English vocabulary lists and self-created grammar drills, I had to agree. Not that his English and painting were done for self-improvement -- whenever I ask Pablo about his artistic influences, he laughs. "I paint whatever the tourists want," he says. Art, he argues, is only an economic tool, the key component of a survival strategy.

It was through painting, though, that Pablo began to realize the benefits of the soft sell. He began to see that if he could get tourists to like him, to feel comfortable, they were more likely to buy a painting from him. If he sold them something they liked, they might even refer their friends to him.

Talking to tourists, then, became an attempt to create an ongoing relationship. His methods were simple but were unusual in Havana. "I always carry $2 or $3 in my pocket so I can go into a bar and meet tourists," he told me in December. "If they see me and I'm sitting down and buying my own beer, they trust me."

"I'm different from the others," he added. "I don't sell tobacco on the streets. I don't bother tourists. I get them to trust me. They ask me for things and I help them."

What the tourists don't know is that Pablo's help earns him commissions. A mojito ordered at most bars will net Pablo a dollar. Dinner for four at a paladar will bring him a few greenbacks and some oil or rice or beans. Taxis, rented rooms in people's homes, cover charges at discos, women, men -- everything in Cuba comes with a commission that usually amounts to between 10 percent and 25 percent.

Cubans still aren't sure what to make of such work. Some shrug it off as a necessary tactic. Others, especially the licensed business owners whom the jineteros serve, complain about their presence, if only because they resent the commissions. The regime would rather do without jineteros as well: In the May 4 English edition of Granma, Castro's state mouthpiece, one of the three executed hijackers was described as a criminal who "was given an official warning about harassing tourists 28 times."

Still, it's clear that hustlers don't benefit only themselves. Most of the 50 or so jineteros I've spoken to since November say they support at least two other people. They may just be telling me what they think I want to hear, but I've visited enough homes and interviewed enough extended family to confirm the substance of their claims. Pablo's neighborhood, for example, shows clear signs of a multiplier effect. All the houses, single-story three-room ranches, have been renovated in the past two years -- thanks in part to tourism-related money. Neighbors with larger unofficial incomes, like the beer delivery-driver who sells poached cases on the side, have used better materials and brighter, fresher paint. But everyone in Pablo's barrio seems to have benefited from those who have contact with foreigners.