Nostalgia for the camellos
Faustino is feeling nostalgic. He looks from the doorway of his house, topped with a 1924 skylight, at the empty bus stop at San Lázaro and Águila streets, and it seems unbelievable. “During the Special Period, camellos (buses) used to go by. Now, not even chivos” (bicycles),” he says, exaggerating the zoological reference. “Look at this. I never thought we’d get to this point.… Nothing at all,” he blurts out, very irritated, alluding to the collapse of public transportation in Havana this week, while clapping his hands together.
Faustino will try to get to his job tonight, “taking whatever I can,” but it might be his last chance to finish the week. He’s a security guard at a private fast-food restaurant that closes at ten and is located just past the bridge over the Almendares River. It’s about seven or eight kilometers away, a distance his health and age no longer allow him to cover on foot.
A former smoker, a heavy one, “who used to smoke a pack and a half or even two a day,” he suffers from peripheral artery disease. He also can’t afford to “burn” some 400 pesos of his budget for a round-trip fare three or four times a week on one of the shared taxis that crisscross the city. “It doesn’t add up,” he complains.
“I’ll lose my job. What can you do?” he laments. “I’ll find another one nearby,” he says with forced optimism, while his wife, Mirta, a “seamstress and university-educated hustler,” stares at him blankly and exhales a soft puff of smoke.
“Even she’ll have to give up the habit,” he predicts, as a pack of the worst black cigarettes, Criollos, costs 250 pesos. “You wish. It’s the only pleasure I allow myself. No way,” she replies furiously, defending her smoky tyranny, and rocks back and forth more forcefully in her aluminum and rubber-strapped rocking chair. The atmosphere grows heated, and a thick silence settles in, like a truce.
It’s barely 9 a.m. and on the avenue itself, in front of the brutalist behemoth of the Ameijeiras Hospital, groups of anxious people crowd together, waiting to catch the first thing that stops, just to escape the gridlock and the cold wind that keeps the choppy sea and their hands in their pockets.
“No buses are going by, only tricycles (both private and state-run), but almost all of them are already full from Havana. They’re very small,” says a woman wearing sunglasses, a wide-brimmed hat and carrying a transparent bag from El Corte Inglés department store overflowing with red tomatoes. She lives “near La Palma,” in the southwest of the city, and works in Vedado as an assistant in a dental clinic.
She says that the fares from her house to La Rampa have jumped from 250 pesos to 300 pesos, and that today she wants to see her sick uncle, whom she loves like a father, who lives near the Obelisk in Marianao. The monument was inaugurated in 1944 by then-President Batista in honor of his first coup d’état, on September 4, 1933, when he was a low-class sergeant and stenographer from Banes.
Same shovels, different landscapes
“In Canada, my son has to shovel snow to get the car out of the garage. I have to shovel too, but shit.” The phrase came from the mouth, with resigned displeasure, of Augusto, a 70-year-old intensive care physician who has served on medical missions around the world. He now faces the encroaching garbage dump on his street, encroaching on the access to his carport, a sort of palisade that he himself calls a “chicken coop hacked out with machetes” through recycling and other opportunities.
The doctor’s house is a few steps from the corner. Suchel Corner, or the Palace of Flies, as some enlightened neighbors like to call it. Others are less cynical and more passionate in their descriptions. You know the type. Unique.
For years, several plastic tanks, each one not dismantled by predatory tradition, overflow in a couple of days, or at most three, and then the waste fills the parterre and advances unstoppably toward the street, almost becoming natural barricades. The road has nearly been strangled by the waste, which ends up being removed by the bulldozer’s blades, that iron horse of Attila that erodes the sidewalk, uproots the sparse grass from the parterres and breaks with its jaws the occasional section of sidewalk that gets in its way.
The result of such an undertaking is something like a post-battle landscape, borrowing the title from Wajda’s 1970 film — a post-war existential drama in which there seems to be no way out for the Poles as they transition from Nazi occupation to the Stalinist regime.
“Soon I’ll have to put wings on the truck so I can fly away from here,” he says, as he briefly warms up the engine and the swarm of flies stirs at the sound of combustion.
For those familiar with art in Cuba, Dr. Augusto’s fantasy brings to mind “Hybrid of a Chrysler,” a sculptural piece created in 2003 by the Cuban artist Esterio Segura.
But while magic was still unfolding in Augusto’s life, he used his shovel to do what needed to be done: push back the boundaries of the garbage dump, which these days has resurfaced with a fungal-like force across almost all of Havana, multiplying the signs of the oil shortage and its resulting collapse of public services.
The doctor has about ten liters of gasoline left in the tank of his beloved “Tico,” a 1990s Daewoo Tico, which he cherishes like the apple of his eye because it’s a marvel: it uses up a liter of gasoline per 20 kilometer.
And it certainly is, at a time when the government has just decreed zero fuel for the market in pesos (Augusto was left stranded in the virtual queue with a ticket that puts him intergalacticly far from the pump) and rationed the supply in dollars, allowing only 20 liters per vehicle at designated gas stations, where lines of cars stretch for blocks and blocks and patience is required to be longer than the wait.
Celeste, passion for Turkish soap operas and reality
Celeste couldn’t care less about politics. What matters to her, a former bank teller for almost half a century and a manicure and pedicure service provider for any neighbor, is whether the heartthrob of the soap opera The Turk (2025), a soldier of the Ottoman Empire wounded in 17th-century Italy, will finally be able to find happiness in what seems to be an impossible romance with a young Austrian village girl.
But politics or reality — which at times are almost the same thing — is more powerful than any soap opera and it’s already knocked on her door. The bag of bread she used to buy “early in the morning, before dawn” has now increased in price by more than 23%. Eight well-baked buns, about 80 grams each, now cost 370 pesos. Just a few days ago, they were 300 pesos. “Imagine,” Celeste summarizes, “the owner has to turn on the generator to bake the bread when there’s no electricity, and that’s fuel he has to buy at exorbitant prices.” This is how Celeste summarizes the explanation the aggrieved delivery man gave her.
In an apartment tucked away at the end of a hallway, where the smell of charcoal clings to the clothes, the former cashier lives with her sister, a few years older than her. Both are originally from Baracoa, “but Havana residents by right of seniority,” and her sister is the one who does the cooking. “She makes delicious stews,” she says, bringing her fingers to her mouth, as if the adjective were emerging from its hidden lexical existence, since it’s very rare to hear this among current Cubans.
Each ear of corn for the stew cost 80 pesos and, according to Celeste’s sister, the vendor told her that these might be the last ones sold at the neighborhood farmers’ market. In fact, the supply chain is the first to react to the energy blockade.
“To get here from Matanzas, the truck driver had to buy 70 liters of diesel at 1,000 pesos each, and then the goods he transported to Havana totaled about 100,000 pesos. That’s why the stall owner has to raise the price of almost all the produce and fruit to compensate and keep sales down. Otherwise, he warned, he’d have to close.”
And a revealing detail: “Oh, and he told her that at the checkpoints to enter Havana they’re asking truck drivers for 50,000 pesos.… Trun doesn’t like us, but we’re even worse among ourselves,” Celeste says, sounding annoyed.
