HAVANA TIMES – I left my house to look for chicken. Not for a special meal or to fill the freezer; not because I was chasing a special offer. I needed to make soup for someone in my family who was sick. In Cuba, though, a phrase as simple as “I’m going out to find some chicken to make soup,” can soon turn into a minor expedition.
I went first to the place where it almost always appears. This time there wasn’t any. I asked, I waited for a while, I looked around, I asked again. Nothing.
So, I continued looking. I crossed a good chunk of the city from one establishment to another, with the hope that one of them would have some left. Chicken has become one of those foods that force you to organize your day around the hunt for it. You don’t just go out to buy it; sometimes you go out to see if it has appeared. After visiting several places, I finally found some.
The problem was the price. A 10-lb package cost 8,800 Cuban pesos, and I was carrying only 5,000 in cash. However, I had money on my bank card, and also a 20 dollar bill. I thought one of those options would work.
I asked if I could pay using the bank’s Transfermovil app. The response was an immediate no.
Then I asked if they take dollars, but that wasn’t a go either. And that ended my possibility of buying chicken – not because there wasn’t any, since I had found some, nor because I had absolutely no money, because I had 5,000 pesos in cash, money on a debit card and 20 dollars in my pocket.
What I lacked was an accepted way of turning all this into the chicken I needed. In the end, I went back where I came from, without the needed chicken. In addition, with the absurd sensation of having crossed half a city only to discover that, in today’s Cuba, having money and being able to buy something can be two completely different things.
The worst thing is, this situation has become ever more frequently the norm.
Many people receive their salary as a direct deposit on a bank card. The money is there. It exists. It appears on your balance. But after receiving it, another story begins.
In theory, you can withdraw cash at an ATM. The problem is that there are ever fewer ATMs that are working, or that have enough cash. And let’s not even speak about going to the bank itself, because there you’ll find infinite lines of people who need to withdraw their own money yet on many occasions must resign themselves to withdrawing only the amount allowed, even if they need more. Five thousand pesos ($7 USD) can quickly disappear in any daily purchase. And when what you need costs more, you must start all over again.
Transfermovil could be—and was—one of the options that for years was presented as the solution
that would make everyday life easier: paying from your phone, transferring money, avoiding cash. But a
tool is only useful if the seller is willing to use it.
The money may be there on a card, but the seller can refuse to accept transfers. Paying in dollars is now possible, but the store can choose to accept them or not. You can have cash but not have enough. Hence, money stops being a solution and becomes instead a kind of jigsaw puzzle.
Today it was my turn. Tomorrow it may fall on anyone else who goes out to seek medicine, food, a hygiene product, or any other thing they urgently need. If you don’t live in Cuba, maybe you don’t understand why this infuriating situation exists. To be honest, I don’t either. However, it does have a “logical” explanation.
It turns out that private businesses don’t like payments by bank transfer because otherwise the
“bank” doesn’t know exactly how much money is being moved, and, as a result, they can “cheat” them. As for the part about “not accepting dollars,” I don’t quite understand it. I should clarify, though, that not all private establishments reject foreign currency—on the contrary, to some extent, it’s actually in the owners’ best interest. That time it was just my bad luck to run into a place that had chicken but wouldn’t accept US dollars.
The most troubling thing is that I wasn’t looking for a luxury. I was looking for chicken to make soup with.
Perhaps that’s what’s hardest to explain when talking about our day-to-day crisis: behind the
statistics, the exchange rates, the prices, and the banking problems, there are people
walking the streets with a specific need.
Someone who needs medicine, someone looking for milk. Someone who needs food for a
child… Someone, like me today, looking for a little chicken to make soup for a sick person.
And after walking around, asking questions, doing the math and looking for alternatives, you can end up heading back home with money in your pocket and empty hands.
Read more from the diary of Kamil Kenders here on Havana Times.