Taxi Ride on a Dark Night

Taxi Ride on a Dark Night

One night on my last trip to Havana, our little group decided to take in some Cuban music at a show at the Havana Club. We made a reservation and took a taxi to Old Havana where the Havana Club puts on nightly shows. One reason I like Cuban music events is because Nora is so well connected with the entertainers. She had been adopted as a girl by María Alvarez Rios, a famous author, singer, and songwriter. The other reason is I just like Cuban music.

I was a little worried about how we would get back to the hotel, as the shows end very late in a dark, older part of town. But I needn't have worried. It turned out the Havana Club is only two short blocks from the Central Park area where the cabs are plentiful at all hours.

When the show ended, we walked out, and right away we encountered an old taxi big enough for the five of us. The cabbie said it would be 10CUC, and I agreed, even though getting to the show had only cost 6CUC. I rationalized the difference because of the late hour.

When you get in an old cab in Cuba, you are dealing with a private businessman, not a cab company. Checking the fare ahead of time saves misunderstandings and swindles, although to be fair, I think swindles are no more common in Cuba than in the US. Anyway, we piled in and started off.

In a few blocks we were in unfamiliar territory, but I still had a sense we were going in the right direction. The cab driver turned into a gas station that almost looked unattended. The driver asked me to pay the 10CUC's now so he could use it for gas. Normally I like to pay for a taxi when I get where I'm going, but judging by the condition of the car I understood how he could have started out across town without enough gas to get there, and anyway we needed gas to get back. He took the money, pumped the gas, and we got on our way again.

We got to the hotel without further incident, and I gave the driver a tip, realizing his budget was a lot tighter than mine. On reflecting about our ride later, this was a private enterprise, budding and trying to grow in the midst of one of the last bastions of Communism. Here was a guy piloting an old wreck he had probably fixed while it was up on blocks in front of his house. And there he sat on a dark, deserted street, hoping to get the jump on some of the newer fleet cabs a couple of blocks away by being right there when the show let out. Competition,—one of the bugaboos of communism—was alive and well that night in Old Havana.

Our driver was a capitalist, an entrepreneur—living by his wits and managing his resources, in this case gas and money, as tightly as he could.

I had to admire his venturesome spirit.

Les Inglis