Getting Around Town

Getting Around Town

Less than 300 miles from where I sit is a city of 2,000,000 people with a poor excuse for a transportation system. Havana has no subway, no ell, no streetcars, an antiquated and inefficient bus system, and the average citizen can’t afford to use the taxis. Fortunately the city is tightly compacted so most people walk to where they want to go.

When I first visited there, the busses were camellos hardly more than semi trucks where the passengers rode in the trailers. I was amazed at the rush-hour crowds waiting at main intersections—often more than two hundred people. Amazed, that is, until I saw a camello pull up, more than 100 people get out of the double doors in the middle of the trailer. Then more than 100 got on the trailer, and the tired old tractor truck ground through its gears to get up a little speed between stops. Of course there was no air conditioning, and every window was wide open.

The camello name (means camel) came from the twin humps of the trailer as the mid section with the doors was built closer to the street to make entrance and exit a step rather than a climb. Fidel and company replaced the last camellos only very recently with new busses from China, but there still aren’t enough of them.

Taxis prowl the city—usually clean new Peugeots or Hyundais. But they cost too much, and they only accept CUC’s, the Cuban convertible currency which average people don’t use. Thus taxis are only for tourists.

Using the old 50’s style US cars that local mechanics have kept running for 50 years or more is a possibility for a Cuban with a long way to go. They all know a hand signal code to ask for rides from the jitney driver. Nora Garcia showed us how that works as she stepped into the street to flag down a 53 Buick for a ride out to the suburbs. Nora quickly negotiated a price for our ride out to and back from the National Zoo in the suburbs.

Some people think of these iconic relics as collector cars, but most are beyond restoration and in bad condition that would not interest collectors. This one growled with a broken muffler and had two wires sticking out of a hole in the dashboard where the radio used to be. To start the engine the driver touched the two wires together and the engine started. I saw a floor shift and asked the driver about it as Buick got rid of those more than a dozen years before this one was new. The driver told me the car had a Toyota truck chasis, engine, and transmission. The only part of the old Buick left was the shell of the car. Some of these old cars have been rebuilt with Toyota engines repeatedly.

There is a train in Cuba, and it can take you from Old Havana east to Cardenas and Matanzas. A few use the trains to commute, but two legs and shoe leather are the most common transportation.

Everywhere you go you see dogs in the streets. All are loose, and many are pets with homes, but a good number are strays with a bleak future. Old, sick, and dying dogs out in public are bad for the tourist business, and the government rounds them up using teams of prisoners and trucks. The strays are kept for a few days and then dispatched with strychnine—a very unpleasant way to die.

But, more about Cuba’s treatment of man’s best friend in a later chapter.

Les Inglis