sábado, 5 de abril de 2014

Public Transportation in Cuba - Moving Backwards

Public Transportation in Cuba: Moving Backwards

April 4, 2014

Fernando Ravsberg*



HAVANA TIMES — As far as its public transportation system is concerned,

Cuba has two choices: to continue doing the same thing for another 50

years or to study the experiences of other countries and apply those

that best suit the situation at home, without the need of reinventing

the wheel.



Transportation Ministry experts acknowledge that things have never

worked as they should. It is true that, during the first years of the

revolution, the transportation system was severely affected by the US

embargo (as part of a strategy aimed at generating discontent among the

people), but American and English buses have long ceased to exist and

the situation has not improved. Not even in the days of Soviet plenty

did Cuba have a public transportation system capable of meeting people's

needs.





Cuba's public transportation system has never fully met people's needs

in more than 50 years.

Long lines of people at bus stops aren't anything new. My friends tell

me that, in the 70s and 80s, going to the beach on a bus was a veritable

odyssey, and getting home meant a pitched battle involving yelling,

insults and even shoving among those scrambling to board the scarce buses.



When I arrived in Cuba as a special press envoy in 1989 (before the

economic crisis hit), I was very much amused by an enormous billboard

which showed a Cuban bus with the chaos and agony of Picasso's Guernica

painted inside it.



In the good old days, those with power got around in cars and those with

money relied on Lanchar, a private taxi company that did pretty much the

same thing privately-owned cabs do today. All the while, the vast

majority of Cubans wrestled for a spot inside the country's buses (1).



Transportation officials were unable to fix the bus problem and decided

to dig deeper: they planned the creation of a subway system. But the

economic crisis came along and they were forced to abandon that plan,

relocating the metro to the surface, on the backs of the rickety buses

people call "camels" (2).



At the beginning of the 90s, bus stops were free of long lines of people

for the first time – but only because people knew it was futile to wait

for a bus. The country had the vehicles but lacked fuel and spare

pieces, so the buses were left to rot at parking lots.



The Public Transportation Chaos



No sooner did the country have a bit of money or credit than the

government paid China hundreds of millions of dollars to buy

locomotives, taxis and interprovincial and urban buses. Curiously

enough, they decided to buy many with engines manufactured in the United

States.



Bringing a spare part for a Caterpillar engine entails buying it in the

United States secretly, transporting it to Canada, shipping it to the

Dominican Republic or Panama and then to the island – a rather long

journey that makes Cuba lose a fair amount of time and a lot of money.



The problem, however, is even more complex. The Ministry of

Transportation isn't only incapable of administering its own companies

properly; it also proves unable to organize private transportation,

which operates with less regulations than it would in a country with a

market economy.



Boteros are individuals who use a privately-owned vehicle to transport

people down set routes. The business brings cab drivers more than US

$1,000 a month, enough for them to outfit their "old" automobiles with

modern Japanese diesel engines.



Cuba is one of the few countries in which private cab drivers decide

their working hours, the routes and even the fare one pays – and they do

all this without having to present even a fuel bill.



The authorities are aware of this, but, instead of organizing things

better, they apply steep fines on cab drivers so as to get more money

out of them. This way, they cover some of the losses these cabs cause

the State but leave passengers completely unprotected.



Private forms of transportation, which are important in Havana, are

vital in the country's interior.



Though Cuba is avowedly a planned economy, I know of capitalist

societies in which authorities exercise greater control and organize and

monitor activities in the sector more rigorously in the sphere of public

transportation.



The Cuban Ministry of Transportation takes no action, even though they

know boteros buy diesel on the black market at one fourth its gas

station price and continue to charge each passenger more or less what

the majority of Cubans earn in an entire day of work.



What's more, there are more and more road accidents, but boteros are

only required to take a one-week course and their vehicles are not

subjected to regular inspections to verify their condition, as is common

in many other parts of the world.



Every day, bus drivers, Cuba's notorious guagüeros, harangue passengers

with a phrase that could well become the slogan of the country's public

transportation system: "come on people, keep moving, let's take a few

more steps backward!"

—–

(*) Visit Fernando Ravsberg's blog.



Source: Public Transportation in Cuba: Moving Backwards - Havana

Times.org - http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=102793

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