Baggage Blues

In the waiting lounge in Miami's airport, Cubans and Americans going to Cuba gather   early in the morning to await opening the check-in desks.  Standing in the center of the lounge is a roll of blue plastic film about four feet wide next to a rotary platform.  I've been in hundreds of airports, but this is the only plastic film dispenser I've seen in a check-in area.

A traveler approached the dispenser with two bags, and the attendant placed one on the turntable and started a motor.  The film wound off the roll onto the bag as it turned around and around.  Each layer of plastic clung to the previous one until a tough, think plastic shell developed like a cocoon of a silkworm.  Then his second bag was encapsulated and the traveler paid the attendant.

I watched several people wrap their bags this way, and later, as I progressed through the check-in line, I wondered what was so valuable that it justified the blue plastic treatment.  I felt a little ashamed of my naked bags, but they contained nothing anyone would want to steal.  After getting my boarding pass, we went through security where X rays and sniffing machines checked us and our baggage for weapons, explosives, illegal drugs, and a bunch of items I can only guess at.  I wondered what the blue plastic people did if they had to open a suitcase.  I guessed they had gone through a search prior to the encapsulation process.

When I go to Cuba, I carry a suitcase full of out-of-date veterinary medicines.  There are never any controlled substances, and out-of-date stuff has no commercial value, so generally there's no objection. But a suitcase full of medicines can be pretty heavy, and I always have to pay an excess baggage charge.  I've been charged as much as two dollars a pound for weight over my 44 pound limit plus $20 per piece of checked baggage.  Even though my baggage has no commercial value, the airlines charge me like it is pure gold.  Curiously, while I routinely pay excess charges going to Cuba, they don't seem to charge me for excess on the return to the US.

After the X rays and sniffs, we are separated from our checked baggage, and I don't see any more blue plastic until I pass through Cuban Immigration in Havana.  In the large room where checked baggage appears, we wait for 10 to 15 minutes for the first bags to appear on the carousel.  Often only one flight is unloading, but the amount of baggage is incredible.  In addition to bags, there are hundreds of packages, cartons of consumer products, even large flat screen TV's and kitchen appliances—all inside blue plastic film wraps.

With the first bag, people crowd around the carousels so you have little hope of spotting your bags until some other travelers find theirs and leave.  Well, what did I expect; this isn't England where people cue up to take their turns in an orderly fashion.  This is a bunch of Americans and Cubans in a hurry to get home or to their hotels.  Finally, the mystery of the blue wrap is solved.  These are mostly people on family visits, and they all have gifts and purchases for relatives living in Cuba.  The carousel is a sea of blue plastic, and people are snatching bags from the carousel and loading pushcarts.  They all look like they have been on the shopping spree of a lifetime.

The plastic is to prevent theft by the airport baggage handlers.

I've never lost a thing in a checked bag, and I have no idea how much such theft occurs, but the suspicion that it does occur sells a lot of plastic.  Maybe that's what the handlers were doing in the 15 minutes it took for the first bags to appear.

Les Inglis