Note that this separation is more due to the fact that you’re rich, than any formal currency arrangement. Foreigners in the 1990s got the same treatment, before any formal dollarization or dual currency system existed.

Cubans who make their money only from official sources are desperately poor. Those with connections abroad, connections to tourism or to the black market are richer.

The money difference merely makes it tangible. And the government goes a long way to try to separate tourists from the real society, though you can still get to it if you care to.

Source: worked there for an ngo for a year

>basically everyone wants to be near tourists

This is actually just the surface veneer. Anyone who approaches you speaking english is a hustler and does it professionally.

Cubans in wider society are interested, but also wary. The police arrest those who spend too much time with foreigners.

The typical cuban keeps to themselves, but the typical tourist will meet endless, non-typical hustlers.

> Anyone who approaches you speaking english is a hustler and does it professionally.

Outside the cities it's a bit better. Hitchhiking is common in Cuba and when we visited it was both fun and instructive to talk to the people to whom we offered a ride. Also talking to the people at CUP bars and restaurants like Dona Yulla was fun. We spoke Spanish though (or a mix of Spanish and Italian).

Agreed, different outside tourist hotspots.

>to whom we offered a ride.

But this is a major difference. You approach a Cuban --> 99.9% normal person. They approach you, speaking English --> probably hustler.

> And the government goes a long way to try to separate tourists from the real society, though you can still get to it if you care to.

It's not like that anymore. There are many Cubans who rent a room in their houses, so foreigners live with them and share with the family.

> The police arrest those who spend too much time with foreigners

It is possible, but I don't think it is very likely. I think those who can be arrested are doing some illegal activity, like selling tobacco or lobster. Generally these products are from the black market. In the city where I live there are always foreigners all year round and they coexist with Cubans normally.

You could rent rooms in houses when I was there too, that's mostly where I stayed. But 99% of the tourist market is in enclaves.

As for arresting Cubans, I may have spoken too loosely. The government doesn't really have a problem with conversations between foreigners and Cubans here and there, or with people having a foreign friend. What the government is looking out for is someone who has a habit of talking to many different foreigners. Usually this is done for some illegal purpose: black market hustling, or sex work. But talking to a lot of different people is one of the things they use to check for that.

As an example, if a Cuban visits a foreign friend in one of those tourist rooms, they have to give up their internal passport to the host, who must record their visit in a log which the police review.

And like anything else, something which is tolerated can still cause problems. i.e. in much of the west, you can do drugs fairly safely, but you shouldn't wave it in a cop's face. So, if you are a Cuban and do have a foreign friend, you still have to be careful. Cuba has a system of neighbourhood government snitches that keep tabs on everyone. However, these have relaxed a bit I think.

I can say I never found Cubans hesitant to make friends with me while I worked there. But, Cubans always have to be careful about where the lines are, and not to cross them.

For more, have a look at all the replies to this question about my post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23305332

> The police arrest those who spend too much time with foreigners.

This is news to me. Do you have a source for this claim?

Police call it "tourism siege" or ideological diversion. I am cuban.

A female Spanish friend and I spent 11 days in Cuba in 2004. The overwhelming presence of security forces (secret police) made me feel the safest I have ever felt while traveling, even while being slightly drunk walking down a back alley at 2am, where two out of three street lights were broken and odd young men were sitting in the doorways of buildings with tons of ancient exposed wiring hanging down visible. There is a police station on every block of the city of Havana, apparently instituted long ago after someone set off a bomb during one of Fidel's hours long speeches. If anyone were to rob you, there is almost nothing they could spend it on without sticking out like a sore thumb. As far as arresting locals for approaching foreigners, back then the issue was with young Cuban women abandoning their $25/mo jobs and turning tricks with tourists ($100/night). I read that the police would never embarrass the tourist, but put the hammer down on the woman once she was away from the man. Those women were nicknamed jineteras[0], from the root jinete (jockey).

[0] https://www.bestcubatravelguide.com/jineteros-and-jineteras/

Seems plausible. Some guys offered to feed us lobster so we went to theirs, but they insisted on hiding the cars we'd rented. People seemed pretty careful about cops.

Lobster is illegal to sell to tourists. Camarón (large shrimps) is also illegal but they can find it more easily on the black market.

I thought it was the other way around, Lobsters and Shrimp could only be sold to tourists and for export in Cuba.

Indeed I wasn't accurate. The parent comment seemed to talk about a self-owned restaurant (paladar); since it is not legal for the owner to buy the lobster and shrimp in the first place, paladares and self-owned guestrooms cannot sell it to tourists either.

I have a friend who had befriended a Cuban guy and she was visiting him every year or two... On her last two visits he was detained multiple days for hanging out with her. He has now left Cuba for Russia.

Yes. Source: I'm cuban.

I’ve caused it, although approx 15 years ago when I was in Cuba for a month.

First time, an obviously dodgy couple in Havana approached me at night shortly after I arrived. I will usually be friendly and talk with anyone without prejudice. I enjoy talking to grifters and operators, and I will happily pretend to be a victim when it amuses me to do so if I only risk a few dollars. I have travelled enough to be somewhat careful and how to look after myself; I speak conversational Spanish which helps; and I am a white New Zealander which often avoids trouble, and it honestly also helps get out of trouble. Police took the couple away shortly after I started talking with them, and I was very concerned. However I managed to track down the relevant police station. A tourist hanging in police station for hours probably caused the police some hassle (they hard out lied and tried to deceive me, but I wasn’t deterred), so eventually the couple were released at about 4AM, and I was able to find out what happened. He was pimping her (absolutely not my scene), and they had been fined about USD4 which I just gave them. I think normal salary was USD5 per week, so they would have taken ages to pay it.

After that hideous experience in Havana, I decided to go to one of the gated touristy beach areas where I presumed every local was vetted. I did speak with locals, but avoided anyone that I thought was dodgy. But apparently one guy was arrested for talking to foreigners, which had included me, although he just wanted to practice English as far as I know (I never had a reason to suspect him of a darker ulterior motive). His friends said there was nothing I could do to help and that it wasn’t a big issue (maybe just par for the course, normal life), but I felt really helpless.

Another time a woman told me to pay a cop USD5 or else the cop would rape her. It didn’t feel like a scam on her part, she was truely scared, and I certainly wasn’t willing to risk anything so I paid the extortion. I think my only fault in that case was being a tourist. I probably should have reported the officer, but I was too surprised at the time to notice any ID, and even now I am unsure if there would have been retribution on her.

I suspect that if a tourist only speaks English, they might be less likely to cause trouble, and they are less likely to be aware of any trouble they cause. Being in ones own tourist bubble is a normal thing for tourists, and is often encouraged (everyone has the incentive for tourists to enjoy themselves and spend money), and it is often difficult for tourists to interact with locals in any meaningful manner (especially given that in a poor country a tourist is often relatively a millionaire, and often in tourist areas).

I am sure Cuba has changed, but I am also sure that the same authoritarian structures are still in place.

Overall, Cuba was the worst country I have ever been to for a feeling of hopeless authoritarianism. As a tourist I felt mostly untouchable, but the grind of the people living there was horrific (warning, politics: I do blame the US blockade for a large part of that, especially because I think it helped Castro stay in power). I have other friends that loved travelling there, so YMMV.

There's a guy on YouTube who recently captured what you've described. His channel is named 'bald and bankrupt'. It was a fascinating look into Cuba. He's also toured many of the old Soviet states too.

> I think normal salary was USD5 per week, so they would have taken ages to pay it.

Pretty sure they would have made that money and more with just one foreign client for whom they were the scene

AFAIK you could go to jail for having tourist money or USD if you did not have an official reason for having it (or it probably would get “confiscated” by police if they found it).

That said, virtually anyone you met in Havana would be after something from you, even if just a drink. It seemed cultural, far beyond the normal percentage of hucksters a tourist might expect to find in a tourist area of a foreign country.

They were sometimes after money, but were taking risks of jail to get it (due to desperation). Hard to blame them when my disposable income might easily be more than 1000 times more than theirs. What I casually spend on a night out at home might be a year or more of savings for them.

I do try to be generous, especially in poor countries since it is easy to do so (I absolutely loath tourists bargaining over a few dollars when they are effectively millionaires in a locality, often bargaining with someone who really needs the income to feed their family). You soon learn to recognise when a person is truely desperate, versus locally very well off from tourist income.

> AFAIK you could go to jail for having tourist money or USD if you did not have an official reason for having it (or it probably would get “confiscated” by police if they found it).

That's the theory, in practice see the article.

One thing to know is that owners of private houses with tourist guestrooms will make you huge portions so that their family can eat some yummy CUC food, even if they are leftovers, rather than the state rations. So it's absolutely not bad manners to finish everything!

I got a source. My ex-Gf who was scrambling to get her brother to contact a family friend to make sure she didn’t get on a government list for being caught with me. The police stoped us when she was on the back of my scooter.

Well, a bit of hyperbole I guess. The police actually arrest anyone that opposes the regime too vigorously on such grounds as them being “antisocial” or “dangerous.”[1]

With the current diplomatic relationship between the USA and Cuba, hanging around Americans too much is likely cause for suspicion.

I imagine fraternizing with Maduro-Venezuelans is not cause for concern, nor Chinese. Not sure about North Koreans, I'd hope that North Koreans are always cause for concern for any secret service.

[1]:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/world/americas/cuba-judge...

> most of the island is mired in poverty

the elephant in the room is the 60 year old embargo and its third-rail effect on American politics.

They can trade with the rest of the world, right?

It's an exclusive-or. You can trade with Cuba, and other companies that trade with Cuba, or you can trade with the US, and other companies that trade with the US.

Basically the United States will attempt to seriously penalize companies which trade with Cuba, though considering that large hotel chains like Melia can fully operate them and seemingly not face consequences, there must be some good workarounds or corporate firewalling...

Not exactly. Theres restrictions and penalties also for companies which trades with them and even for ships. They also cant use dollars in the trade.

I think the embargo extends to other WTO members.

May not right

The actual elephant in the room is 60 years of brutal communist dictatorship.

"elephant in the room" refers to something that is huge but that nobody talks about. Everyone agrees with the fact that marxism doesn't work, and everyone talks about it, so I don't think we can call it an elephant in the room. there is far less discussion (especially in the US), about the impact of the US sanctions

the same discussion applies to venezuela

I was referring to the recent trend of blaming USA for Cuban poverty. Characterizing it as "elephant in the room" is somewhat en vogue for leftist types. And I was turning it back on them. The real "elephant in the room" is the failings of the brutal communist ideology that failed the Cuban people in nearly every possible way.

Good old times of right wing dictatorship, when cuban dictator was USA friendly. No embargo. Nobody cared.

wonder why you're being downvoted, The American ambassador literally presented Batista with a golden telephone (that's where the symbol comes from) as a reward for having essentially sold the country out to a few chosen American companies (in this case the telecom industry)

Not true, US had a weapons embargo against the Batista regime in 1958, this helped Castro to oust Batista.

yep. Everyone here crying out "dictatorship" apparently has never heard of Fulgencio Batista.

I mean, the US embargo is a big cause of why they're poor. But the dictatorship is the cause of that embargo.

If Cuba could trade freely with the US, their economy would be better. If Cuba were under a more free government, their economy would be better: also, they wouldn't be under a US embargo, and their economy would be even better.

Whether an ideological stance is worth the economic collateral damage is a value judgement.

But you can't say the embargo is not causal of Cuban poverty.

> But the dictatorship is the cause of that embargo.

Well, the political ideology of the dictatorship and its unwillingness to be a puppet state of the USA are the cause of that embargo. As diplomacy in the Arabian peninsula shows, the USA has no issue with dictatorships and hereditary absolute monarchies provided they buy American weapons and fight on the appropriate side of proxy wars.

The united states doesn't need to enforce a trade embargo. Cuba's government does not control the united states.

Poor people all over the Caribbean living in all the destitution described here and then some

Many Cubans acknowledge that both pieces have resulted in the misery of regular people. They're not at all naive about their government or the US's policies towards them.

Guy who decries dictatorship just asks other people to shut up, very consistent.

And strict regulation of the economy along Marxist lines, which we know doesn’t work from the multitude of other failures.

The brutal communist dictatorship that the embargo has helped to further entrench. Simple fact is, all these years later, both exist.

The communists don't believe in world commerce, why an embargo will affect them after all if they don't want people to trade or have private property?

It's a pretty elastic word these days, especially given China. And of course they do want overseas trade. The US embargo of using the power of the state to make it as difficult as possible for even non-US companies to trade with Cuba is hardly a pro-freedom one.

So far as I can tell it's this way because 95% of the US doesn't care one way or the other but there are Cuban exiles in Florida who care a lot about punishing Castro, and they're good at voting.

That's a proof their system was a lie. Che Guevara gave an speech about how Cuba would thrive without global trading, without private property. Well, the results speak for themselves. No communist regime could survive with its own production. It seems i triggered some communism fans.

The 'Elephant in the Room' is 100% Fidel Castro Inc. and his militarized island empire, and totalitarian suppression of everything and everyone.

A more extreme but reasonable comparable would be North Korea.

List of dictatorships [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regimes

Maybe there are two elephants in this room?

The dictatorial regimes in Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan are not facing the same problems.

Nor the hideous racist regime in Israel.

Castro and I would not get along, I am a dissident by nature, so I cannot bring myself to support his regime. But we cannot blame the economic failures on Castro, now dead, RIP.

The Cubans have done well to survive more or less intact for this long in the face of the sanctions.

It is my belief, some one here may know better, that it was the sanctions that pushed Fidel into the Soviet camp in the first place. He was a nationalist, not really a communist to begin with.

Whatever he would still have been a hideous dictator like most of the surrounding countries.

Castro Inc. is the source of the problem in Cuba.

To look anywhere else really is to legitimize his corruption.

The fact is Saudi has Oil, meaning they can keep their population fed, also, their version of 'totalitarian' is cultural, not ideological. They've had similar rules for 1200 years. If it were not House of Saud it would be House of X, same thing.

And Israel is racist? But not the surrounding regimes who want to wipe them off the face of the planet, and have tried to do so on a few occasions?

Yes you absolutely can blame Castro and his hypocritical, corrupt, fanatical insistence on Marxist Leninist economic central planning and state control for the misery and poverty of Cuba. Castro ruled for decades, Cuba is only now slowly leaving his shadow. The U.S embargo was a disaster and a very stupid policy with some blame for Cuba's miseries but the majority of their ruin is very much their dictatorship's doing. I'm sorry, but to avoid this blatant causal relationship, shared by many other countries that never fell under major U.S sanctions but which did apply Marxist central planning, is to avoid the extremely obvious.

It is not the dictatorship, it's the economic system they're into. But people still believes communism makes countries thrive into wealth and freedom. They never give any example of successful communist country.

These buses are called Guagua. There's a simple reason why [0].

[0]: https://www.thecubanhistory.com/2016/09/origin-of-the-cuban-...

Everywhere in the developing world is like that, regardless of the currency situation. When I was in El Salvador, a man that was probably close to 70 years old offered to pedal me on his bicycle to the hostel for the equivalent of 50 cents. I only wanted to know the direction.

I wonder if 100+ millionaires think this as they walk around downtown anywhere in the US.

Most of central america and the caribbean is like this, from my experience. I'm not convinced that it has to do with the two separate currencies.

this is an extremely bad take.

Uh there was this little thing called the Mogul Empire you might have heard of, that tended to frown upon sati.

Seriously have you ever even met someone from Central America.

This is one of the dumbest comments I’ve seen on this site. It’s been 500 years. 500 years ago, the catholic church was burning people at the stake for heresy and vlad tepes was impaling peasants.

I’ve spent a lot of time living with the Maya people in Guatemala. I was raised Irish catholic and they’re more catholic than my family is for sure.

The Maya human sacrifices were probably even longer ago than that.

Also, what do the Maya and Aztec atrocities have to do with Cuba and the Caribbean? The Taíno who inhabited Cuba were an Arawakan people — as far as we know totally unrelated to the Aztec and the Maya, who lived 1500 km away. This is like saying that the Lithuanians were a brutal culture because the Romans (about the same distance away) sacrificed Christians to the lions.

Yep, the Aztec might have been brutal, but its hardly like the Spanish were any less so, and for similar religion fueled reasons even.

The Spanish were, as far as we can tell, dramatically more brutal.

Not at all [1][2][3]. Why do you think the surrounding tributary city-states allied with the Spanish? Though human sacrifice was common in Mesoamerica at the time, under the Aztecs it took place at an unprecedented scale.

I'm curious, though, about why you'd make such an implausible claim without backing it up with any evidence.

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/feeding-gods-hundred...

[2] https://www.history.com/news/aztec-human-sacrifice-religion

[3] https://www.ancient.eu/Aztec_Sacrifice/

Than the Aztecs who used human skulls as construction material?

You mean like https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/wamba-ossuary ?

Yes, by orders of magnitude. The Aztecs sacrificed thousands of people; the Spanish sacrificed millions.

> the Spanish sacrificed millions.

Source?

Why not trillions?

While it's true they killed a lot, like most empires 5 centuries ago, they weren't as bad as the others.

Hernan Cortes defeated the whole Aztek Empire with 600 men. How? Easy, he had multiple tribes helping him because almost everyone of them wanted the azteks gone. That means they waged war against natives and they won. It has nothing to do with sacrifices.

From a total population of around 45 million, around 95% of them died smallpox and other deadly viruses.

Cortes even married an indigenous woman and had children with her just as a lot of other conquistadores did. The Catholic Kings legalized and promoted mixed marriages almost 500 years before it was legal in the US. That's why from Argetina to Mexico you can find millions of natives, millions of mixed people and millions of europeans.

The Spanish would have been quickly squashed all the way to the sea were it not for essentially every other native group allying with them against the Aztecs because of the brutal treatment they suffered since the rise of the Aztecs.

Once the Spanish had a foothold, European diseases did most of the killing.

Hernan Cortes had around 600 men. They had no chance against an empire like the Aztec. Fortunately for him other tribes wanted to see the tyrannical Aztecs gone.

Some people think he arrived there with laser rifles and nuclear bombs to wipe out and entire empire.

The propaganda around this is strong I guess.