IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 6 ENGLISH | Page 66

What they paid me was never enough! But I have a family, and I also dared not leave my job, because I was afraid to lose my pension. I don’t know why! That crappy pension hardly does me any good!” Despite his age, he hangs on to a not so recommendable habit: smoking tobacco. He doesn’t even stop doing while he is changing his client’s pesos into coins at the Palatino bus stop, in the El Cerro neighborhood. He charges 20 cents for each peso, but his anxious clients, who are on their way to work, or to run some personal errand at that moment, prefer losing a twenty-coin in the transaction, than the whole peso to pay for public transit. When that expense adds up over a month, the sum they cannot allow themselves to lose from the meager salaries. “What I do is not legal, nor do I pay for a license or anything. That way I avoid putting myself in a position to be told on, which could bring on inspectors and the police, if I stayed at the same place all the time. Today, I’m here; tomorrow, in Old Havana; the day after, at any other intersection, but always early on account of my clientele, who are on their way to work. I have a relationship with a bank that exchanges all the pesos I get here for twenty-cent coins. For that good work, I pay out a little something every day.” His black skin shows the sweat brought out by the summer heat, but Arturo does not seem overwhelmed by the high temperature. He stops talking to me, bent on exchanging coins with a large group of future passengers who approach him. My uncle and his job The creative ability to find an unexplored area in the market, and creating one’s own space within it, seems to be a natural gift for Cubans. At least, that’s how it appears to be in a foreign experts’ report from 1950.2 This may explain how in the eight years between 1944 and 1952, savings accounts in banks more than double in size: from 688.5 million to 1,662.1 million dollars.3 When I share my experience with Arturo to a neighbor, he told me “that’s exactly what my already dead uncle did. He was a very creative man; he was always inventing devices and items for homes.” “He lived across from the Capitol, and one day noticed that the people who waited for the camello [industrial, articulated bus] to Alamar had to do so standing the whole time.4 They had now where to sit in front of those enormous arches. So, he got the idea of making 10 or 15 wooden benches, and renting them to the long line awaiting the bus. He charged a pittance, 10 or 15 cents per bench. When the bus arrived, he’d pick them up and then start renting them again. In only one day, he’d make enough money to cover his home’s basic needs. Yet, to make a long story short, one day, he was denounced to the police. His rentable benches were confiscated, fined 1,500 pesos for “illegal economic activity,” and warned that the next time he’d go before a judge and be accused of “illicit gain!” Imagine that! He was one of those old time guys that always bragged that no one in his family had even stepped 66