HAVANA TIMES – Next to the barbershop, there is a small square of concrete that provides shade at certain times of the day. When a customer arrives on a motorcycle, I tell him to park it in that corner. There is also a much larger space on the other side of the fence: the parking lot of an abandoned company, but the sun shines there all day. Since not many people come by motorcycle, two have never ended up parked there at the same time, and they have rarely gotten in the way of my father’s car.
Those customers are a special case. Some come in their vehicles because they work as taxi drivers and take advantage of the fact that they are nearby; others simply have the means to do so. But the latter almost always prefer to come on foot. If they live nearby, within a reasonable distance, they decide to save on fuel. And that is the big problem in these cases: gasoline.
When I started working at the barbershop, a liter of gasoline could cost two thousand pesos or a little more, but after a few months, its price had risen to four thousand. That was on the informal market, where people obtained it in somewhat mysterious ways and then resold it. As you might expect, customers began leaving their motorcycles at home.
One of the first people I gave a haircut to while I was learning lives in a rural settlement on the outskirts of the city. He always used to come by motorcycle, but later he started hitchhiking. One day, while I was cutting his hair, he told me he was collecting plastic.
“To take it to Materia Prima and sell it?” I asked.
“No, not at all. Are you crazy? It’s to burn.”
It turns out that where he lives, there was a furnace that could heat plastic until it reached a liquid state. If you added a little gasoline to it, the result was a fuel just as practical as any other.
“Look at the motorcycle right there. That’s what I came on today,” he said, and I needed no further proof that it worked.
Later, I learned about other people who were doing the same thing, that it was nothing out of the ordinary. We haven’t turned water into wine, but we have turned plastic into gasoline. The smell produced by burning this fuel feels highly toxic from the moment you inhale it, and it is common for the smoke left by motorcycles throughout the city to be saturated with these gases.
Not long ago, a customer who always comes by motorcycle arrived on foot. I asked him what had happened, and he told me his vehicle was dismantled. Apparently, someone had sold him gasoline as though it were high-quality fuel, but it turned out to be fuel made from plastic. Since his motorcycle is a modern model, it requires fuel with a high octane rating that is clean. “Trying to save a few pesos, I ended up screwed,” he told me.
These homemade fuels tend to work better in older motorcycles, like the ones Cubans brought back from the socialist bloc countries during the last century. Nevertheless, I see more and more people riding motorcycles. Those who opted for electric ones are now returning to combustion-engine models. This is because gasoline prices have fallen in recent weeks to around 2,000 pesos ($2.50 USD a liter or $9.40 a US gallon). Cubans with the means can now import fuel and sell it to the public. Simple competition has regulated the informal market.
When I think about these things, I remember a customer who spends long periods abroad. When he leaves, the price is one thing, but by the time he returns, everything will have changed. It must be a strange feeling to leave Cuba and, upon returning, find that what you left behind is no longer there. As if the country were an apple in a display case: every day it is a different one, sometimes better, but almost always worse.
Read more from Erick Hernandez’s diary here at Havana Times.