Cuba's City Restaurants

Years ago, I found a conference as a pretext and went to Cuba. My real goal wasn't the conference, but to meet other academics who, like me, were attending the Cuba conference with certain thoughts in mind. I also wanted to see for myself the paradise that our romantic leftists spoke of with such praise. They said healthcare was free, there was a medical system that had found a cure for cancer, schools belonged to the state, the crime rate was very low, and people were very happy.

It was a complete paradise, as you can imagine.

Well, we said, let's go and see this paradise for ourselves.

I arrived in Havana after a long flight with Air France, with a layover in Paris. The plane was packed. The high number of men was immediately noticeable. They had narrowed the legroom between the seats. They had packed as many men as they could onto the plane. Though, I didn't encounter anyone complaining much about the cramped seats.

These aging, middle-class European lechers were in the mood of, "Just get us to Cuba, no matter how you do it."

Anyway, we reached Cuba. Since I was staying at the home of an acquaintance of Maria, who was my student from the Czech Republic via Erasmus, I was a guest in a local home rather than a hotel. I still paid 30 dollars a day. I thought that was a good amount of money in a country where salaries are 20 dollars. It has a population of 11 million.

The weather is perfect. The sea is like a diamond. Cuba, an island nation across from Florida, has oil underneath and sun above. It is rich, very rich in terms of resources.

Just like the Gulf of Mexico, it is full of oil underneath. The sun shines like glass. It has beautiful cities, each distinct from the other, such as Varadero, Villa Clara, and Santiago, where the tomb of Che, the revolutionary idol of socialist Cuba, is located. Some are mountainous and lush green, while others have kilometers of golden beaches. They have beautiful, massive buildings left over from the Spanish, even though socialist Cuba has not invested in the infrastructure for these buildings. In fact, there is nothing new. Everything is old. It is from the colonial period. The exteriors of the houses are crumbling. The streets are full of dilapidated cars that the privileged class of socialism brought in through illegal means from American junkyards. They give tourists a currency called CUC. Cubans cannot use this money. Or rather, Cubans have no money. Their clothes are in tatters. Their shoes are torn. Their dental health is poor.

There is no hygiene in their butcher shops or other grocery-like places. People look as if they have been darkened by the sun. Tourists, on the other hand, walk around, eat, and drink like lords. It is also evident that some Cubans are better off. When you dig a little deeper, it becomes clear that there are those who sell cigars they pilfered from the cigar factory to tourists at one-tenth of the price.

This is a profession: selling public property to tourists for free to generate income.

I decided to look around a bit more. I went to a coastal town where the hotels are located. There are all-inclusive hotels. It is a holiday paradise serving tourists who come via Canada because there are no flights from America due to the embargo. It is not a paradise for Cubans; it is a complete hell. Because they either serve as women for entertainment or as servants. Young girls provide entertainment services to aging old men, and older former service girls work as cleaning maids. That is, servants until they die. And for pennies.

While walking the streets of Havana, I saw a place in the back that looked like a restaurant. I saw the locals eating there and decided to go in and take a look. I had trouble entering because of the foul smell. When they realized I was a tourist, they told me that cheap food was forbidden for tourists.

Even though it was very cheap, I wouldn't have been able to eat it anyway because of the smell. But the local citizens, unable to eat in restaurants, were filling their stomachs in these places. When they got tired of eating the rice that the socialist state—the state that thinks of all its citizens' needs—gave them to eat at home, they would come here. Though, the rice provided by the state would run out in ten days. They hardly ever saw meat anyway. Since the state is socialist, it didn't bother with the protein issue.

When I saw the news today about a city restaurant opening in Üsküdar, my trip to Cuba came to mind. I hope our income level increases as soon as possible so that the necessity of filling our stomachs in publicly supported restaurants disappears.