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Published: September 11th 2014
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Shopping Sprees (blog by Stan)
I was getting my haircut today on the side patio of the neighborhood barber (a teenager who dreams of getting to America someday). He asked if I had traveled to other countries, and then asked which of all the places I had been I liked the most. I said Cuba, of course. He responded that he thought Cuba would be a great place to live if you had money, but the constant worry about how to survive on the $10 to $40 monthly salaries drives everybody crazy. I am sure there’s some truth in what he said, that part of why I love being here is that I have money (albeit not much by American standards, but I might as well be a millionaire by Cuban standards). I don’t have to worry about making ends meet. And so I have come to greatly enjoy things like grocery shopping, an activity that no doubt causes great stress for the ordinary Cuban.
As is true in many countries, shopping is almost a daily task (hoarding is not part of the culture here, and we don’t have the shelf space nor the frig
space to buy in bulk and store up the way Americans do). Here are a few lessons I have gleaned from this daily quest: One, the deeply ingrained value of frugality is contagious. I suspect that this value is slowly dying out in our culture as the Depression era generation passes from the scene. But here, I have come to appreciate the pinching of pennies, and I do mean pennies. On one shopping spree, I ran into a friend on the street and offered to buy a cup of coffee. I was going to take him to a local barrista who makes a mean espresso for 20 cents, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He guided me instead to one of the private doorway cafés where you get your cafeicita for a mere Cuban peso, which converts to around 4 or 5 cents. Likewise, people will walk a great distance to get the carton of 30 eggs for 33 pesos ($1.40) instead of 35 pesos ($1.50) at the corner store.
For this reason, I have learned lesson #2: where to shop and where not to shop. Concerning the latter, I have come to dislike going into Variedades,
the all-in-one variety store, sort of a Walmart in miniature. Before frugality set in, I enjoyed going there (for one thing, it’s air conditioned), and compared to American prices, most things are pretty cheap. But again, when folks realized what I had paid for a broom or a frying pan, they would rolled their eyes and whistle through their teeth, generally expressing their feelings in one word, “carísimo!” (sky high expensive). Plus, I’ve learned that customer service isn’t really on people’s minds at Variedades, the state-run store. In contrast, the “particulares,” the mom-and-pop micro-enterprises, treat their customers well, as they are hustling to make a buck and survive. Another problem with Variedades is the way it’s divided into many departments; you have to pay for each item in that item’s section of the store. So you may wind up waiting in a long line several times (soap, clothespins, shower shoes, garlic powder, and ketchup are each rung up at a different cash register).
In terms of where to shop, there are many good options. You have the corner bodegas for some of the basic staples. This is where the libreta, their version of food stamps, is used.
Every Cuban family gets the monthly libreta, giving them a little over a week’s supply of rice and beans, cooking oil, sugar, coffee, hard bread, and milk (which is only available in the bodegas for families with young children). Then there are the street vendors, some of whom push their carts along the streets trumpeting their fare (“pan suave” –soft bread– is a constant cry from streets all over town throughout the day), while others have staked out a street corner to park their cart. We’ve enjoyed making friends with Omar, the vendor down the street from our apartment, who supplies us with goodies such as bananas, avocadoes, yucca, peppers, mango, lemons and limes. And then there are the particulares, those cottage industries run out of people’s homes, sometimes on the up and up, sometimes on the sly in the underground economy. We’ve learned which doorways or windows to knock on when we want good cheese or fish, hot commodities in more ways than one. Then, there’s the weekly walk early on Sunday mornings to la feria, the farmer’s market. It’s a couple of miles from the seminary, at the parking lot of the baseball stadium. I love it because it somehow reminds me of home; I suppose tailgate markets are much the same everywhere. And we always leave feeling like we landed a treasure of some kind. This past week, Kim found a farmer selling the last of the mangos, which are now officially out of season.
Which brings me to lesson #3, the appreciation of seasonal foods. Aside from a few things like tomatoes and watermelon, we Americans are generally content with the supermarket’s imports of every hothouse fruit and vegetable imaginable 52 weeks out of the year, causing us to lose the satisfaction of eating fresh pineapple and mangos and avocados. Being here, and not having ready access to everything I might want, has served to deepen my understanding of the virtues of hope and patience.
Finally, lesson #4: I have learned to keep some money in my pocket in order to buy things when they are available, because they may not be there tomorrow. This applies to things like coffee and toilet paper, which may be absent from the shelves for weeks at a time. I’m still looking for baking soda. All this reminds me of the young barber’s assessment of life in Cuba. For many, pure ground coffee and toilet paper are luxuries you just learn to do without. The Granma (daily newspaper) serves bathroom needs. The espreso most households offer (with some sense of embarrassment) is café mescláo, which has a good deal of chicharo mixed in for filler. The fact that I have money in my pocket and get excited when I see a bag of real coffee in the store (which happened yesterday), is a sign that I don’t really know what it’s like to live in their world. By the way, the reason I go to that local kid for the haircut is because after going to the official barbershop on Calle Medio (Main Street), and sharing with some friends that I got a great deal on a haircut -- $1.50, they shook their heads in dismay that I had paid so much. The kid charges 60 cents.
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Doooooglas
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Thanks Stan!
Thanks Stan! Your next haircut is on me!