Neighbors of the Artemisa town of Quiebra Hacha participated in a raffle in which they used a curiel to determine the winner.
It happened during the traditional “Fiesta de San Antonio” that is celebrated every June 13 in that town and the images were shared by a Tik Tok user in a nice video which showed the unique draw.
At the price of 100 pesos each bet, the residents of the town choose between 30 winning numbers with different products, mostly bottles of rum and other liquors, arranged in a circle.
Each of these prizes sits on a small opening stand. Once the bets are made, the organizer takes a small box where the curiel is and, after going around for a few turns, lets him get out of his box and find another one to hide in, one of those with prizes.
The choice of rodent determines the prize winner. While one wins, 29 lose and the owner of the curiel takes 3,000 pesos. But, judging by the tiktoker comments, everyone is having fun with this entertaining raffle.
According to carli86loli, in the popular festivities of Quiebra Hacha -locality of the Mariel municipality, in Artemisa- this curious game of the curiel raffle has always been seen.
“You know, popular parties, everyone is extremely drunk and what they want is a bottle of alcohol,” explained the tiktoker, who later admitted that in an inexplicable way, the curiel almost never enters the booths graced with spirits , but in others that carry other prizes such as “games or dolls” (which makes players insist on their bet).
With a sense of humor, the Cuban confessed that he had played several times, but never saw the mouse enter the coveted booths. “I don’t know, for me that the curiel was not drunk,” he said.
Without fully understanding how this was possible, the young man brought a curiel from “a neighbor” to replace the official of the raffle. And what was his surprise when he saw that this other rodent, which could not possibly have been trained, did not enter the booths with rum either.
“I didn’t even earn a bottle of rum with that curiel!” The young man exclaimed at the end of his video.
Raffles and tombolas in Cuba are not widespread in parties and popular celebrations, since the regime always persecuted and frowned upon the gambling and bets among the population.
However, these ways of distributing prizes are still used by some in the country, as demonstrated by activists from the Cuban civil society that, together with the artist Yulier Rodriguezorganized a raffle for works of art whose proceeds were invested in disposable diapers for poor families in Havana.
Gambling and clandestine betting in Cuba are some of the “vices” of Cuban society that, in theory, were stopped in 1959, the year in which gambling was prohibited by the Cuban Revolution.
However, images released by the independent media Cubanet in 2016 they let us see how a sector of Cuban society continues to entrust its luck and future to gambling.
