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

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