By Iván García (tel: 53 7992439).
From your
Cuban correspodent / Reporters Without Borders
In socialist Cuba, a few privileged people can spend the equivalent of four
years of the average Cuban's salary in a single afternoon's shopping. Other
Cubans have to scrimp and save for months just to buy a pair of new shoes.
Big-name fashion czars like Jean-Paul Gaultier and Paco Rabanne have staged
shows in Havana and top models such as Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss have done
fashion shoots in the island. And despite the economic embargo, the Cuban
capital has boutiques that sell enormously expensive clothes and shoes made by
the likes of Tommy Hilfiger, Levi's, Calvin Klein, Guess, Reebok, Nike and
Timberland.
The shopping centre at the Hotel Comodoro, in the western part of the
capital, is bustling every afternoon with people with dollars to spend – a
small group that includes prostitutes and well-known artists and sports figures,
people who get regular fat remittances from relatives living in Miami and, once
in a while, some government official who publicly attacks American consumerism
but secretly yearns for an expensive item of clothing or jewellery.
Those who get just a trickle of dollars have to make do with shoddy goods
bought up at knockdown prices in Mexico City or the Panama Free Zone and resold
in Cuban shops with a tax-based mark-up as high as 240 per cent. But the vast
majority of Cubans, who only see dollars in films, are reduced to playing the
popular new pastime in Havana of window-shopping without buying, since there are
no longer any moderately-priced clothing shops using local pesos, as there were
a decade ago when the Soviet Union was subsidising the economy.
The country's range of industrial goods whose sale paid for import of
clothing and shoes, vanished overnight after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
Since 1993, Cubans have had to buy their clothing with dollars or in shops that
sell secondhand items that have either been donated or confiscated or don't sell
in shops that only take dollars.
Carmen Díaz, a 28-year-old office worker, regularly visits shopping
centres with her eight-year-old son "just to dream a bit." Carmen and
her husband earn 400 pesos (about $20) a month between them, which is barely
enough to pay for food. "And not even that," she says, " because
in the middle of the month, we have to go on a survival diet of watered-down
potato puree or plantains."
Her shabby clothes are evidence that for more than 10 years she and her
husband have not been able to renew their wardrobe. Her son is luckier, because
better-off neighbours gave him clothes their own children had grown out of.
At the beginning of the year, Carmen and her husband began putting aside $3
a month so they could buy some new clothes in a year's time. "With the $36
we'll have by next December, we'd like to buy some decent clothes," she
says. A virtually impossible dream, because a set of good sports clothes and
footwear, not even anything elegant, would cost more than $200 -- almost two
years salary for the ordinary Cuban.
Meanwhile, a few people, such as Laura Ramírez, a 19-year-old mulatto
who sells her body for dollars and even advertises on the Internet, can spend
$500 on clothes and perfumes in a single afternoon in the classy Meliá
Cohiba shop. But the vast majority, like Carmen the office-worker, look after
their clothes very carefully and pray to God that the pair of shoes they've been
wearing for the past 10 years will last a bit longer. | 