A Spanish-English dictionary, sunscreen, insect repellent, a towel, chocolate ice cream: these are the items that eluded me during a recent trip to Cuba. For all the hoopla about the island’s opening and the more than three million tourists who swamped it last year, Cuba is no country for shoppers. The more mundane the object of desire, the more exasperating it can be to find.
I’m not saying that these common items are completely unavailable in Cuba—I’m sure they are for sale somewhere on the island—but I couldn’t locate them. And I did look. The problem might be that I spent half of my trip in Trinidad, a cobblestoned colonial city on the Caribbean coast. When I ventured out to the Galería Comercial Universo, which my Lonely Planet claimed featured “Trinidad’s best (and most expensive) grocery store,” it was closed due to lack of electricity. I was able to peer into the darkened grocery store to see considerable yards of empty shelves. Electricity woes might have accounted as well for my inability to obtain ice cream for my son. When we finally found it, on the menu of an expatriate beach club in Havana, it arrived melted. And the waitress couldn’t find a spoon.
At the Plaza de Armas in Havana, the large open-air market, my inquiry about a Spanish-English dictionary was met with “no es fácil,” an answer I heard often in Cuba. The bookseller did offer up a Russian-Spanish dictionary. At a kiosk in a suburban neighborhood, which the proprietor proclaimed “not just the best bookstore in Havana, but all of Cuba,” I found a Larousse dictionary from 1987, with yellowed pages that crumbled as I opened it. It was for sale for the equivalent of five dollars, a week’s salary for most Cubans. (After I returned from Cuba, I was told I could find a decent used dictionary at Cuba Libro, an English-language bookstore that opened in 2013.) I never found a state bookstore that was open.
Having been a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe in the nineteen-nineties, and more recently in China, I have some experience with Communist and post-Communist countries. In Cuba I saw elements of many of them, from Albania to Vietnam. Like Prague in the nineteen-nineties, Havana’s old city is swarming with tourists who gaze at the faded splendor of its Belle Époque architecture. Private restaurants inside these elegant wrecks, called paladares, beckon tourists with creative meals made out of the few ingredients available locally, mostly chicken, pork, cabbage, rice, and beans.
But Cuba also looks to me like a North Korea with palm trees. To be sure, Cuba has evolved politically, investing in education and health care rather than weapons of mass destruction. But the economic fundamentals in these last bastions of Communism are much the same. Like North Korea, Cuba maintains a distribution system in which citizens pay a low cost for inadequate rations of staple foods. (At one state shop, the provisions, listed on the blackboard, were grains, washing soap, bathing soap, toothpaste, sugar, salt, coffee, evaporated milk, eggs, and oil.) As in North Korea, archaic laws prevent the private sale of commodities that have been deemed strategic to the nation. Fishing is limited in both countries on the grounds that the bounty of the seas is the exclusive property of the state.
At a mercado agropecuario (basically a licensed farmers’ market) in a residential neighborhood of Havana, I was amazed by products that appeared to have been crafted in people’s basements or garages. There were homemade clothespins and clothes hangers, soup ladles and sieves, cast-aluminum pots and pans with hand-carved wooden handles. (The pots were offered for the equivalent of two dollars.) Plastic molded toy cars were so flimsy that they made the cheapest made-in-China toys look as sophisticated as Swiss watches. Homemade vinegar and ketchup were sold in repurposed beer bottles. This is not unlike North Korea, where people desperate to earn money used to make sneakers to sell at the market.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in 1991, both the Cuban and North Korean economies went into a free fall—the Cubans call this time “the special period” and the North Koreans “the arduous March”—and neither country has completely recovered. In Cuba, the loss of cheap petroleum led to the breakdown of highly mechanized agriculture and food distribution systems, and the almost complete collapse of the manufacturing sector. Even today, neither country has much of a manufacturing sector. Imports to both countries are also limited by sanctions and hard-currency shortages. Although the United States restored diplomatic relations with Cuba, in July, the island remains under a trade embargo.
“Almost all legal imports in Cuba are handled by the government international-trading monopolies,” Richard E. Feinberg, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Latin America adviser to the Clinton Administration, told me. “Their choice of products is not necessarily driven by consumer demands.” He went on, “This is like eastern Europe in the old days, where you might see a hundred cans of sardines imported from Thailand that obviously nobody was interested in buying.”
Cubans are not starving like North Koreans, but many do lack basic consumer goods. Whereas just about everything used in North Korea—be it plastic sandals or hairbrushes or umbrellas—seeps across the eight-hundred-and-fifty-mile border with China, Cubans are dependent upon what can be stuffed into a suitcase and carried by airplane. The Miami-based Havana Consulting estimates that visitors carried three and a half billion dollars’ worth of goods into Cuba in 2013.
There are stores in Miami that specialize in spare parts for the Russian-made Lada and Moskvitch clunkers that Cubans still drive. The burgundy-colored official Cuban school uniforms are strangely easier to buy in Miami than Havana. Cloth diapers and diaper pins are another popular item brought into Cuba by plane. It is not legal to resell these items in Cuba, but everybody seems to do it, often through word of mouth. When I asked a Cuban driver with whom we were snorkeling where he had acquired a rather smart Spiderman beach towel, he gave me a long-winded explanation of the market system, which boiled down to this: “Sometimes somebody has something that I want to buy, but if I ask them where it came from they won’t sell it to me.”
Raúl Castro, effectively Cuba’s ruler since 2006, when he took over for his ailing older brother, Fidel, has been easing up controls on economic activity. Private employment is now allowed in two hundred and one categories. Farmers are allowed to sell fruits and vegetables that they produce over their quota. Homeowners are allowed to rent rooms in their houses to tourists (a freedom that would be unthinkable in North Korea). An exemption to the prohibitions on manufacturing also permits Cubans to make and sell the goods I saw at the Havana neighborhood market, which are classified as handicrafts.
The result is that almost every home in the heavily touristy old center of Trinidad has thrown its shutters open to offer something for sale—hand-painted T-shirts with images of Che Guevara, paintings of vintage cars, macramé handbags, or visors made of old soda cans—a profusion of Cuban-themed kitsch that is cheerful if not particularly useful. Alas, none of it was what I wanted to buy in Cuba, but it provided a glimpse of the possible.
