In Cuba, 'On the Left' Means A Flourishing Black Market
Guile and Caution Employed to Counter Chronic Shortages

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 22, 2006

HAVANA -- Most mornings a woman with darting brown eyes lingers here in the sticky hot corner of an open-air vegetable market.

She effects a casual stance, elbow propped nonchalantly against a cigar stand, waiting for the regulars. If she nods, her customers follow her to a side street.

A few quick, nervous glances and the woman reaches inside her blouse. From her bra, she removes her contraband -- neatly folded plastic grocery sacks, illegal except in state-run stores.

Five for one cent.

The transaction, like countless others each day in Havana and throughout this island nation, takes place " por la izquierda ," or "on the left." Cubans use the phrase to describe back-alley deals both large and small. They scheme on the left to cope with chronic shortages and to skirt myriad rules that prohibit most forms of private enterprise and govern the minutiae of their daily lives.

Cubans go to the left for almost anything: for staples, such as rice and beans; for quotidian items, such as the plastic grocery sacks; and for forbidden delights, such as lobster or scarce beef. On the left, Cubans risk fines or jail sentences to watch soap operas captured by illegal satellite dishes, to prowl restricted Internet sites and to boil "secret potatoes" bought after reaching limits on the ration cards that dictate the buying habits of everyone in the country. Mothers of children under the age of 7 -- the only Cubans allowed to buy discounted milk at state stores -- even sell their allotments at inflated prices to collect money for extra food.

The thriving underground economy functions as a pocket of capitalism, prescribed by supply and demand, within the Western Hemisphere's only communist state. Observers say it may be the precursor of a push for a market economy, one that could accelerate after President Fidel Castro dies; on the other hand, they say, the black market may simply be the byproduct of a system that rewards the wily and well-connected.

"They're very entrepreneurial," Wayne Smith, a former chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, said in an interview. "When I go down to Cuba, I've had the impression that everyone is waiting for something to happen. There's a sense that changes are going to come."

While the world wonders what a post-Castro Cuba might look like, the resiliency of the island's black-market culture demonstrates how far Cubans are willing to go to circumvent Castro's dictums. But it also exposes a certain elasticity in government control of the island.

Some of the deals made on the left, though illegal, are clearly tolerated. They sometimes take place in plain sight of uniformed police, or in view of the less obvious, but equally pervasive, network of neighborhood informers.

The sense of tolerance, however, can vanish abruptly. In August, shortly after Castro underwent stomach surgery and relinquished power during his recovery, government authorities swept through neighborhoods in a crackdown on illegal satellite dishes. The agents were presumably bent on blocking outside news broadcasts -- rife with rumors that Castro was dead or suffering from terminal cancer -- that might cast doubt on the rosier official accounts.

As word spread, Cubans scrambled to dismantle satellite dishes that had been open secrets, squirreling them under floorboards and in attics.

"There used to be dishes there, there, there," a man who lives in a Havana suburb said recently, pointing at his neighbor's homes.

"The funny thing is that they think we want to watch the news from Miami," said the man, a government port worker who, like dozens of others interviewed, spoke on condition of anonymity. "But all my wife wants to see are the soaps."

The Castro government says the restrictions that push so many Cubans to the left are, in some cases, necessitated by the U.S. trade embargo and, in others, a counteroffensive in the nearly half-decade propaganda war between the countries.

Satellite dishes are banned in order to block the U.S. government's TV Marti, which broadcasts programming critical of Castro, National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcón said in an interview. Internet use is restricted, he said, because the embargo prevents Cuba from tapping high-speed cables in international waters.

When the subject of food rationing comes up, Alarcón invariably points again to the U.S. embargo and to a declassified U.S. State Department memo written shortly before the trade embargo was enacted in the early 1960s. "The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support," the memo states, "is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship." The memo proposes "a line of action which makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government."

"It's equivalent to genocide," Alarcón said of the memo and of the subsequent embargo.

Even Cubans who are critical of the Castro government tend to have similarly heated reactions to the embargo. Their trips into the black market unspool as quiet acts of rebellion against both U.S. policy and the restrictions imposed by Castro.

Entire networks have developed to feed the black market system. There are suppliers, who skim materials from state-run enterprises. And there are middlemen, who buy the stolen goods and resell them.

One recent afternoon in Cojimar, a town outside Havana famed as a hangout of Ernest Hemingway's, a middleman sat shirtless in his living room, flashing signals at passersby. He gave a thumbs-up to a man looking for chicken; he shook his head at a woman looking for milk.

"Here, everything is on the left," he said, sweeping his arm across his modest home and shouting to be heard over a Steven Seagal movie that he'd picked up from an illegal DVD vendor.

The house, once half its current size, had grown wider and longer because of several dozen bags of cement that he had collected one at a time from "some guys" over more than a year. His guys would stuff their pockets with cement at the end of each workday until they had accumulated enough to fill a bag. The family's freezer bulged with chicken waiting to be resold, and the refrigerator held three large flans, because the middleman had come into a windfall of eggs.

"This is an art," he said, sagging back into a recliner. "Not everyone can sell like me."

That same afternoon, in another town near Havana, a 30-something Cuban went out in search of videos to rent. He walked down a street lined by homes with peeling facades, then stopped at an entrance that stood out because of its fresh paint job.

A gaunt man cracked the door open a few inches, and tersely asked: "What do you want?"

After poking his head out and looking each way down the street, the man ushered his customer inside. The floor was brand-new faux marble, the recliners plush velvet -- more signs of prosperity amid the street's decay.

"I've got some Julia Roberts, I've got some Al Pacino," he said.

But he had no intention of handing them over. Instead, he would relay a message to a courier, who would inform "the old man." The customer would have to wait six hours, then go to the old man's house to retrieve the movies.

"Things are tight now," the movie dealer said, explaining that police had been more vigilant since Castro's illness.

A few days later, back at the market where izquierda culture might be strongest, a customer was on the lookout for lobsters. A man stepped up to him and whispered, "Meet me two blocks down the street."

Lobsters, abundant in Cuban waters, are illegal in all but a few of the most expensive state-run restaurants. The rest of the catch is exported.

The lobster vendor hopped in the customer's car and directed him through a labyrinth of city streets to a colonial-era home. A man on the rooftop flashed a caution signal, and the vendor instructed the customer not to move.

The vendor slipped out of the car and disappeared through a door, reappearing 10 minutes later to wave the customer inside. At the top of the stairs, a woman appeared with a dozen beautiful lobster tails.

The customer handed over six dollars, grabbed the lobsters and dashed down the stairs. He wheeled his car back toward the market. Three blocks away, the vendor yelled, "Stop!"

He jumped out of the car, and in a moment, he was gone.