The resourcefulness of people who find a means to
scrape by never ceases to amaze me. Finding an “edge” to eke out a living in
difficult times, identifying a use for a by-product others might throw away,
never fails to bring a smile to my face. That’s exactly what happened when I
read of the ingenuity of one septuagenarian in Havana, who has found a way to
arbitrage his way to supplementing his livelihood. Here’s the story that appeared
in www.translatingcuba.com, as told by Cuban blogger Regina Coyula. http://translatingcuba.com/petty-finance-regina-coyula/Petty
Finance / Regina Coyula
Petty
Finance
The
bus stop at G and 27th, three in the afternoon. Several people gather around a
skinny seventy-something. He’s not selling peanuts, he’s not selling
newspapers, he’s not selling candy bars, he’s not selling anything. He is
exchanging one Cuban peso for 80 centavos. It works because although public
transport costs forty centavos, in practice breaking a Cuban peso into smaller
coins is difficult because Cuban pesos are only in the places selling on the
ration book (at the bodega and the bakery) are fractions handled.
People
prefer to make change with the skinny guy, outfitted with a cardboard box of
his own invention hanging just below his chest, because with a peso you can
only pay for one trip, and if you change it you can pay for two, others prefer
to favor the retiree before tossing a coin in the fare box.
And
so it goes! I say to myself annoyed at my camera. I try to speak to him but he
crosses diagonally across G Street to the stop for the P-2, which starts its
journey towards Alamar there.
I
tried to calculate (you already know, numbers aren’t my strong point): With
five people making change, he can buy himself a small coffee; with forty a
pizza. How many hours a day will he have to dedicate to tramping from stop to
stop, how many times will the police stop him. But in any case, the next list
of allowed self-employment professions should include moneychanger,
coin-breaker, or something like that.
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