Phone stores mobbed in Cuba
Queues stretching down streets appeared outside Cuba’s phone shops as the government allowed people to sign up for mobile phone services for the first time.
The contracts cost about €75 to activate – half a year’s wages on the average state salary. That set-up fee does not include a phone or credit to make and receive calls.
Most Cubans have at least some access to dollars or euro thanks to jobs in tourism, with foreign firms or money sent by relatives abroad. Lines formed before the stores opened, and waiting times grew to more than an hour.
“Everyone wants to be first to sign up,” said Usan Astorga, a 19-year-old medical student who waited about 20 minutes before her line moved at all.
Getting through the day without a mobile phone is unthinkable now in most developed countries, but Cuba’s government limited access to mobile phones and other so-called luxuries in an attempt to preserve the relative economic equality that is a hallmark of life on the Communist-run island.
President Raul Castro has done away with several other small but infuriating restrictions, and his popularity has surged as a result – defusing questions about his relative lack of charisma after his ailing older brother Fidel formally stepped down in February.
An article on Friday in the Communist Party newspaper Granma said it was Fidel Castro’s idea all along to lift bans on mobile phones, and that he was behind recent government orders easing restrictions that had prevented most Cubans from staying in hotels, renting cars, enjoying beaches reserved for tourists and buying DVD players and other consumer goods.
“They are part of a process initiated and called for by Fidel,” the paper said of the recent changes.
Fidel Castro has not been seen in public since undergoing emergency intestinal surgery in July 2006, but he has continued to pen essays every few days and recently criticised DVDs, mobile phones, the internet, email and Facebook, asking: “Does the kind of existence promised by imperialism make any sense?”
He wrote on Saturday that the island may be going too far in easing some restrictions. “As in Cuba, there are those with theories about easy access to consumer goods,” he wrote, dismissing those people as “imperial ears and eyes hungry for these dreams”.
Mobile phones on the island can make and receive calls from overseas, a key feature because the overwhelming majority of Cubans have relatives and friends in the US.
Cuba’s state-controlled telecommunications monopoly, a joint venture with Telecom Italia, charges €1.70 a minute to call the US and €3.64 a minute to Europe and most of the rest of the world. Making or receiving local calls costs 15p a minute.
Teenagers and students with expensive sunglasses and fashionable clothes dominated the lines, alongside the occasional elderly housewife or construction worker with dusty boots and threadbare T-shirt.
Inside stores, Cubans showed ID cards to sign contracts and crowded around glass cases where phones rotated under bright lights. A basic Nokia model offering little more than calling and text-messaging cost about €47, while a snazzier camera-phone retailed for €174 – more than twice the cost of a similar model in the US
Only foreigners and Cubans holding key government posts had been allowed to have mobile phones since they first appeared in the country in 1991. Thousands of ordinary Cubans already had mobile phones through the black market, but could activate them only if foreigners agreed to lend their names to the contracts.
