CUBA NEWS
March 31, 2003

FROM CUBA
80 new bus inspectors will be deployed in Havana

HAVANA, March 26 (Ariel Delgado Covarrubias / www.cubanet.org) - Havana's city bus officials have announced that starting April 1, 80 new inspectors will take to the streets in order to stem losses due to pilfered revenue by bus crews.

According to official figures, 19% of the moneys paid by passengers never makes it back to the authority. Inspectors will be boarding buses and asking to see passengers' tickets, imposing fines of 20 pesos on passengers who can't demonstrate they have paid, and fines of 200 pesos on fare collectors who haven't issued the appropriate receipts.

Buses in Havana are manned by a two-man crew, the driver and a collector who walks fore and aft collecting fares from passengers. When they collect the fare, they hand the passenger a receipt, and any transfers requested.

What the inspectors are trying to curb is the practice by the collector of pocketing some fares, either by not issuing a receipt, or by some other subterfuge.

The problem is, even corruption has its quirky characteristics and works within a system.

Some bus riders quickly perceived that the inspectors could represent a threat to what little bus service is available now. They say bus crews are paid so little, less than 10 dollars a month, that if they can't skim off the till, they won't have any motivation to go to work and the critical shortage of transportation could become even more acute.

"That missing money goes to the pockets of the drivers and collectors," said one would-be passenger who said he had been waiting for more than one half-hour for his bus.

"The buses have a maximum capacity posted, and crews overload them in order to be able to meet revenue quotas and have some money left for themselves," said an older man, remembering a relatively recent time when authorities decided to enforce capacity limits on buses and there were more people waiting for buses all over the city than there were people who managed to ride on one.


Versión original en español

 

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