Cubans go to street to augment rations
By ANITA SNOW
Associated Press Writer
HAVANA --
Cubans may not have McDonald's or Jack in the Box, but they do have
pizza in a basket.
Customers shout orders to a terrace kitchen atop a 1930s-era two-story
building and the pizza is lowered to the street in a rattan basket.
Pizza Celina is among the more inventive places that Cubans go for
street food to augment government food rations. Elsewhere in Havana,
self-employed street vendors hawk peanuts, popcorn and a snack known as
"chicharrones de macarones" - macaroni pork rinds - made by boiling
pasta, drying it the sun, then frying it.
Near the University of Havana, students line up at lunchtime outside a
building with peeling pink paint to shout orders for pizza with tomato
sauce and cheese for 8 pesos, which is about 38 cents. A little bit more
buys a ham or sausage topping.
Minutes later, a basket on a rope drops for payment. Money collected,
the basket comes down again, bearing hot pizzas, grease soaking through
butcher paper wrapping. There is no soda, or napkins.
The basket-on-a-rope delivery method is popular among those who share
and sell goods in apartment buildings without working elevators.
"We come here because it's good, it's fast and it's cheap," said Laura,
a 20-year-old history student. Like many Cubans, she wouldn't give a
last name, uncomfortable talking with a foreign reporter about an issue
as political as food.
She said she often eats for less money at the university cafeteria, but
the food there isn't as good as at the privately run Pizza Celina.
"This is a bit expensive for us but we come when we can," she said. A
recent increase in the monthly government stipend for students, from 20
to 50 pesos (about $1 to $2.50), means she can now afford to visit the
pizzeria once a month.
Laura lives on the other side of Havana, and it's impractical to go home
to eat. There are few nearby places to buy cheap food, save for a nearly
empty state-run vegetarian restaurant. "I've never gone in there," Laura
says.
The only thing close to a fast-food chain in Cuba is the state-run
Rapidito or the food counter at Cupet gas stations, which both sell hot
dogs and fried chicken most Cubans cannot afford because they are priced
in the "convertible pesos" used by foreigners.
Government workers are paid in regular pesos, which trade at about 24 to
the convertible peso or 21 to the U.S. dollar. A Rapidito hot dog at 1
convertible peso costs more than a day's pay for a Cuban earning a
typical monthly salary of 350 pesos ($16.60).
Under the communist country's 45-year-old universal ration system,
Cubans get a heavily subsidized monthly food basket of beans, rice,
potatoes, eggs, a little meat and other goods. That, along with other
subsidized meals such as workplace lunches, provides about two-thirds of
the 3,300 calories the government estimates Cubans eat daily.
Cubans use their salaries and any other income to buy the rest of their
food at farmers markets and overpriced supermarkets or through black
market purchases and trades.
If they have enough money, or no way to get home for lunch, Havana
residents go to the street for low-priced snacks. That often means
bustling Obispo Street, the capital's largest concentration of stands
and vendors selling food for pesos.
Elderly men walk down the cobblestone street hawking 1-peso (5-cent)
paper cones of raw peanuts, clutched like floral bouquets.
A teenage boy at a weathered wooden cart asks 2 pesos for "granizados,"
small plastic cups of ice drizzled with strawberry-flavored syrup.
Another vendor sells homemade popcorn in plastic bags for 3 pesos.
Many street vendors are licensed, and the government runs storefront
stands selling pizzas, hot dogs and pork burgers for 10 pesos. And
government stands offer a cold glass of "guarapo," or sugar cane juice,
for 1 peso.
Similar foods are sold at Obispo's "tencen" - poorly stocked government
shops that evolved from American-style five-and-ten stores of the 1950s
and whose nickname is an adaptation of "10 cents."
The "tencen" are among the few places Cubans can buy food and other
items in the national currency they earn. The shops also have lunch
counters serving fried chicken or pork steak and a bakery offering
sugary cookies.
Then there is the "frozzen," a 1-peso cone filled with a smooth, cold
vanilla mixture with a synthetic taste - a snack sold at the "tencen"
and government storefront windows.
Just a block away, a convertible peso store sells imported frozen treats
made from dairy products most Cubans cannot afford. There, the Nestle's
Crunch chocolate ice cream bar is 1.10 convertible pesos - about 26
regular pesos, or $1.20.
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