Baby Cubano

Sharing a table in Trinidad, Cuba, the I made eye contact with this frowning baby. We were sitting in a restaurant called La Redacción, formerly a Bautista-days newspaper office in 400-year-old Trinidad. The baby, sitting on his silenced typewriter, and the salt & pepper shakers propped up the napkins on our table. The about-to-cry child stared me down. I saw “LA REDACCIÓN” upper-cased across his typewriter’s paper table.  He came home with us to become as close as I will get to “branding.”

So Cuba:  in 2015, the government provided everybody free food, free education, free healthcare, a free roof over la cabeza, and a monthly stipend worth about $24 USD. Working for a living optional. There was no toilet paper to be had.

The Cuban government also provided a good-as-free ferry across Havana Bay. At the Havana-side terminal, three uniformed men guarded with machine guns, collected fares and served as ferry deck hands. The ferry was a steel barge about 40’long X 30’wide. We boarded through a single-wide steel door which was locked behind the 100 or so Cubanos and other tourists with whom we took the 5-minute ride. Looking back at Havana through heavily-screened windows, we realized our ferry was – no question - a death trap.

Returning from the Hershey Train side of the bay, the uniformed man who unblinkingly extorted from tourists a greatly exaggerated return fare, stuffed the bills in his shirt pocket fast as he could.

So the machine guns on the Havana side. The story is, some years earlier, that same scary ferry had been hijacked to Miami.

In 2015, Tourism was going nuts in Cuba – like 4 million, largely Europeans/yr. Huge capital was being invested by somebody to restore all the crumbling pre-Castro Spanish Colonial architecture in Old Havana. There was virtually no crime and not much more spoken English. Covid killed all that. The current exodus is en-mass. Pobre Cuba.