The New Cuban – Part 2

So where were we in Part 1? Something about Cuba, and lobster, and Communism, and how it’s not working any more. Oh yes:

Enter the tourists.

So I’m rolling in, dropping like 5 bucks on a big fuck off lobster and feeling like some kind of Floyd Mayweather, and in my rum soaked generosity I flip my waiter a couple of bucks as a tip for helping me get the meat out of the claw.

If your restaurant has seven tables and everyone does this, you’ve literally just earned more from tips in an hour than an engineer earns in a month, regardless of your wage (which will be basically zero). And who are the waiters and waitresses? Young people, intelligent people, who realise they can have a better life by scraping lobster meat out of a claw for some small Arabic-looking guy from London who bores them with his shit Spanish. And thus we arrive at The New Cuban.

I also received this for one of my meals. Their tip was slightly less.

The New Cuban is the one who understands that the money we tourists have is literally incomparable to what they could possibly ever earn from the state. They turn their homes into BnBs, they get jobs as service staff, they write “TAXI” on a piece of cardboard and stick it in their windscreen. And they start earning more, and being able to sneakily import more, and the new class emerges: the middle class. Wait, that’s not communism! Too right it’s not, and that’s fine by them. They start hiring the other class, the everyone else, to be their cleaners, drivers, maids. They want to fight the communism because they know what they can achieve. And these New Cubans aren’t afraid to express it, either.

This guy hasn’t quite got the New Cuban memo, but hey, someone’s got to operate the toddler goat bus

They express themselves best at La Fabrica, where the 20- and 30-something’s of Havana have split off from their hip shaking, salsa dancing, smokey taverns and open shirts and sandals, at what can only be described as Shoreditch, Berlin and the entirety of Latin America contained within one building. In fact more of a complex, this place encompassed five bars, two roof top patios, a jazz club, an art gallery, a sculpture exhibition, a huge cinema screen showing horror films in front of sofas and armchairs, and a massive super club playing chart, techno and house. Everyone there was Cuban, everyone there was wearing skinny jeans and button shirts, and most of them gave us dirty looks as we slinked around in our t-shirts, shorts and flip flops, looking mildly Cuban due to our complexions but not at all Cuban due to our slack dress code and our surprised and slightly awkward demeanour. I’d been out all day and was wearing a straw hat, which went down even worse.

This is an audience watching a guy get his hair cut in one of the rooms at La Fabrica. Shoreditch eat your heart out.

We realised that this lot were the lucky ones, or maybe the clever ones, who had already made their way to the middle of the class system by using tourists as their springboard. In London, venues like these are populated by the hipster corporates, the PR and advertising hoardes, the startup tech gang and a handful of teachers who got lost. In Havana, it’s the waiters, cab drivers and bar staff, with a smattering of the actual owners of the restaurants and rental properties (who usually come into their property through inheritance or by chance, and so are slightly older than the clubbing type). They have money, they want to look good, and I did not fit in. One guy who thought I was Cuban even tried to buy my hat off me whilst I was at the bar. I declined.

Me wearing the hat, immediately after the attempted purchase of said hat

The New Cuban is taking over and the disparity is just going to increase. The embargo is about to lifted, trade is already filtering through and the tourists are pouring in (we even found Coca-Cola from Mexico at several points during the trip but it tasted weird so we didn’t have it again). The general consensus among the Cubans we spoke to was that this shift was positive, and their generous attitudes to us testified to that. What testified even more was the art exhibition at La Fabrica. It was your usual hipster subversive, counter-cultural affair, but with a cruel, ironic twist. Over here in the affluent West, being counter-cultural is going against big business, criticising our rampant capitalism and pushing concepts of revolution to forge a more balanced society. Over there, being counter-cultural is mocking the revolution, protesting the repression of financial expression and promoting the import of big business.

Ah, those Cuban hipsters have so much to learn.