‘With half a peso I bought a goat…’ And with 15 pesos?
By Aurelio Pedroso
Years ago in Cuba, a very popular song listed what could be purchased with only half a peso. Thanks to the homespun humorist who wrote it, the new generations have learned that the list of things that could be acquired with that amount was interminable.
It was that song, a guaracha, that started me thinking about the 15 pesos that will be paid to workers every day as compensation for the gradual disappearance of lunch rooms in work places.
This step has a singular importance, and could give us an indication as to where and how far things will go – government decisions included.
Two elements are alarming and are joined by an umbilical cord that no scalpel can cut: the economic crisis besetting the island and the practical impossibility to feed, with subsidized prices, the 3.5 million people who eat (or pretend to eat) in some 24,700 workers lunch rooms.
According to official figures, the country spends more than US$350 million just in rice, grains, meat and oil so the worker can pay the equivalent of a U.S. nickel or a dime for something warm to eat at lunch time.
In this scenario (as academicians say) we have the state-run food services, whose inefficiency is so notorious, not to mention corrupt, that hopefully they will be given a lesser role, so that private entrepreneurs can seize the reins of this horse that’s running wild in search of refreshment and can’t find it.
A private “cafeteria,” a business run by a family, offers more than 20 dishes in its menu, whereas a state-run lunch room sells machine-made cigars (one peso apiece) and sometimes a roll of bread and some refreshment. The message couldn’t be starker: “Eat this bread, smoke a cigar, thanks for the visit, come back soon.”
If the private sector is given the green light to take over (hopefully, the cooperatives too), those 15 pesos could pay for a luncheon or a plate of homemade food, a topic that my colleague Ramy has written about in this website. Enough to keep us going until the evening, when the wife will serve dinner at home.
The situation is almost unique. The state gives the workers money to make up for the elimination of the workers’ mess hall. Some of those workers will be getting more money for lunch than for the work they do. Some of them, whom I know well, don’t even eat or drink at their work places because they prefer to bring a homemade snack, rather that undergo the culinary torture dispensed in the mess hall.
The “experiment,” as it is called, has begun in four ministries – Labor, Finance, Domestic Trade and Economy & Planning.
Near the Finance Ministry, on Obispo Street in Old Havana, there are plenty of restaurants, both state-run and private. And I daresay the latter have a better reputation, although this is the territory of the City Historian, where the situation is different in terms of the good options in national currency and foreign cash, like the outdoor cafes the Chinese had on Four Roads Plaza.
One such restaurant offers a variety of dishes made with eggs. It has a commercial name, but every resident of Old Havana knows it as “Leal’s eggs,” in a clear reference to Eusebio Leal, the City Historian and president of the Habaguanex Corporation.
The owners of some of these private establishments are already considering hiring more employees to deal with the flood of customers who will show up at noon, asking for pizza, or a sandwich of whatever-is-available, or a plate with rice ‘n’ beans, pork (sliced with a razor), and a seasonal salad.
The same is being contemplated in the barrio of El Vedado, near La Rampa, given the vicinity of the Ministry of Labor and Social Security and a dozen other ministries and organizations that eventually will eliminate their own mess halls.
I’m revealing no secret when I say that many non-employees eat at those mess halls, or make a living out of them, because (through the art of criminal magic or survival reflex) the state-owned larders are the source of the eggs, oil, chicken, spices, sausage, ham, cold cuts and even detergent that are sold on the black market.
What the authorities eventually decide will be decisive. Let’s pray it won’t be like one of those bad plays in chess where the White Queen takes off with a Black Bishop in a mad escapade and the King is forced to leap from a tower before the imminent checkmate.
Hundreds of millions of pesos will go on the street. They must find a conduit and not contribute to an increase in the inflationary process.
From good sources, I hear predictions of new measures to palliate the crisis that will have an unfavorable effect on the population. There is talk of a reduction of the foodstuffs available for convertible currency, of cutbacks in the city’s public lighting, of reduction in the amounts of food served in restaurants without a corresponding reduction in prices.
The international crisis notwithstanding, there will be a need for local incentives so that we don’t go back to the early 1990s, when a grapefruit rind, badly spiced and breaded, was the equivalent of a succulent steak. Not all of us are ready to dust off the Machiavellian recipes of the so-called “Special Period.”
“It isn’t easy, but it’s not too difficult, either,” is the way ordinary Cubans describe these days and the days to come. The entire island is worried, but tranquility rules – so far. The often spoken and sometimes erroneous “Now or never” fits the current problematical situation to a T.
Half a peso will take us nowhere, but with 15 pesos we’ll have to get cracking, because time is short.
Aurelio Pedroso, a Cuban journalist, is a member of the Progreso Weekly team.
