HAVANA CUBA.– Shortly after five in the morning, Ricardo, 46 years old, finishes a sip of coffee, puts his nurse’s uniform in a damaged backpack and before closing the door of his house, lights a cigarette. When he arrives at the bridge that delimits the town of Calvario with the Electrical distribution, in the Arroyo Naranjo municipality, south of Havana, he walks to the highway. There he waits for the PC route that takes him to his work.
“My shift at the hospital starts at eight, but I’m almost always late. A while ago you could catch a ‘bottle’ (hitchhiking). Now, due to fuel shortages, transportation has become very difficult. It takes me five hours to get to and from work. Sometimes more,” says Ricardo.
In that area of the capital there is an urban bus terminal where three routes operate (P-6, P-7 and PC), which link the suburbs of Calvario, Parcelación Moderna and Reparto Eléctrico with the city center.
Nelson, former director of Metrobus, explains that “starting in 2007, a public transportation master plan began to be designed in Havana. 16 routes called Main routes were implemented and that is why they were labeled with the letter P. They circulated along the busiest arteries. Its frequency was five to ten minutes during peak hours. With a Chinese loan, Yutong articulated buses with the capacity to transport 200 passengers were purchased. MAZ brand buses were purchased from Russia and Liaz brand buses from Belarus. The busiest avenues in Havana were repaired and paved. The project was for each of those 16 routes to have 25 to 30 vehicles. Metrobus had a fleet of 480 buses.”
“This scheme was complemented by 600 conventional buses, of lower capacity, called Feeder routes, labeled with the letter A, and were responsible for transporting people to the inner neighborhoods of the city. The third link in the plan was to design various suburban train routes that moved in the periphery and beach areas. The ideal for a city with more than two million inhabitants would have been an underground subway, which was once among the plans and was scrapped due to its high cost (it cost one million dollars to build each kilometer). But maintaining a fleet of 2,500 buses, as there was in the capital until 1989, does not guarantee good service and is not profitable due to the high consumption of fuel and spare parts.”
According to Nelson, “this public transportation scheme was complemented by a supposed fleet of state taxis that were never put into service in addition to private transporters. The project collapsed when the government stopped paying loans to China. Then the economic crisis and lack of foreign currency worsened. “Urban transportation right now is bankrupt.”
In a city like Havana, between 900 and a thousand urban buses should circulate daily: only then would a million people have their mobility guaranteed. Yusniel, administrator of the Playa municipality bus stop, points out that “due to the lack of fuel and the poor technical performance of many vehicles, less than 200 buses are running per day. There are routes that make only one trip or none at all.”
Samanta, a university student, considers that transportation in Cuba is a headache. “A trip that under normal conditions would take twenty or thirty minutes, takes four hours. From Monday to Friday I have to go to the CUJAE (the former José Antonio Echeverría University City is today called the Technological University), which is in Marianao, and the trip It’s an ordeal. In addition to the delay and the fights in line, on the bus you have to deal with pickpockets and ‘jamoneros’ (stalkers). The other way to go to school is to take a private taxi. But they already got on “The fare is 200 pesos. I’m about to leave school.”
Leonel, a bank employee, lives in Alamar and works far away, in El Cerro, and says he is not going to ‘take a fight’ (worry). “I am not going to spend a single peso on taking an almendrón (collective taxi), since my salary is 4 thousand pesos a month and if I pay 400 pesos a day on taxis to go to work and return home from Monday to Friday, I would spend 2 “A thousand pesos a week, 8 thousand pesos a month, double the salary I earn. The account doesn’t add up.”
Lourdes, a primary school teacher, blames the regime for the poor management of urban transportation and all public services. “Although it hurts the government and they accuse you of being ‘counter-revolutionary’, Cuba is a failed state. Nothing works. If you want to eat more or less well, each month you would need the equivalent of twenty average salaries (2,500 pesos), about 75 thousand pesos, an amount that very few can have. The economic package has not yet started and prices have already risen. The dollar is trading at 280, a box of chicken costs 10 to 12 thousand pesos and for a trip on a ‘almendrón’ (taxi from the 50s) from La Palma to Parque de la Fraternidad they charge you 200 or 300 pesos. It’s crazy.”
Sergio, retired, believes that “the audacity of the paunchy people who govern the country has broken the limit of what is permissible. You have to have a concrete face to say that they are not going to affect the people and that is why they did not raise the price of urban transportation in Havana. But they increased the cost of an interprovincial trip by bus, train and plane five or six times. What urban transport are they talking about? If there are no buses on the street.”
They have not yet begun to apply the new rates in the prices of interprovincial transportation and the sale of fuel, and private taxi drivers have increased the cost of the ticket. Junior, a taxi driver, alleges that “the official press does not count the several-day queues I have to stand in to buy fuel. And they only sell you twenty liters. The rest you have to ride on the left and they ask you 600 or 700 pesos for a liter of fuel. The government gives us stories and lies. The reality is that although the new prices have not begun to be applied, it is impossible to buy fuel in Cuba. You have to pay two thousand pesos or more to get a turn at the gas station. And that does not guarantee that you can buy.”
“When they start selling fuel in February, you will see that only those who have dollars or the equivalent of 280 pesos, the current value on the black currency market, will be able to buy. And we have not yet seen the worst of this story. Within two months, if the government continues with its intransigence, the dollar will sell for 300 pesos and a taxi ride will cost the same. Every time passengers complain about the price, I tell them to go protest to the Central Committee. They (the regime) are the ones who have generated this chaos,” Junior asserts.
On February 1, new rates will begin to be applied to the sale of fuel. Due to a domino effect, inflation is going to skyrocket. Just like the cost of living. Many wonder when the long-standing economic crisis that Cubans are experiencing will bottom out.
