By Caridad
HAVANA TIMES – After a year and a half away from home, you forget certain things. Well, it’s not exactly that you forget them, but rather that both the body and the mind quickly get used to certain comforts. It’s worth clarifying that I’m not referring to extraordinary things. I mean matters as simple as, for example, getting from one place to another.
They say gasoline sales have stabilized, but when I go out into the street I can still spend half an hour waiting for some kind of transportation. The avenue is quite busy; I’d say that now twice as many cars travel along it as did two years ago, but we still have the same private transport units in conditions that leave much to be desired.
Curiously, even though it continues to be a blow to the pocket of any worker or student, the cost of the fare has decreased relative to the dollar. Before I left, a fare from the outskirts to the city center cost half a US dollar. Now with $1 you can pay for four fares, but the issue is that here we don’t receive our salaries in that currency. So, less than two years ago the fare that cost 10 bolivares now costs 100.
Continuing with the topic of the dollar: in Venezuela we drink our first coffee of the morning while checking the price of the US currency relative to the bolivar, because every day the Central Bank raises its price, and the purchases we make—even if we pay in bolivares—depend on the price of the greenback. And it’s not that simple either.
Because the reality is that merchants now peg the prices of their products to the euro. Nobody pays in euros, but it’s more expensive than the dollar and gives them a larger profit margin. So yes, everything is much more expensive than before I left Venezuela.
The only advantage is that there’s no longer so much stress when paying cash in dollars. Before, merchants would inspect the bills with suspicion and refuse to accept them if they were too old, too new, or had any imperfection. Now they simply take them from your hands. Even better, they give you “discounts” if you pay with them.
But I’ll return to the detail: officially we receive our salaries in bolivares. And the worst part is that if I go to buy, for example, a fan, they charge me $20 in dollars, but if I pay in bolivares I have to hand over the equivalent of $25 or $30, depending on the seller.
It’s possible that in Caracas things work a little better… or a little worse.
Power outages (which I thought were fewer) continue with their daily rhythm, though without organization or prior information, as always.
The most pleasant part of my return (beyond the reunion and my desire to live here) has been that in the area where I live we now have water. Not that it comes every day, or even lasts half a day, but it is arriving weekly, with enough pressure to fill the tanks that now no longer have time to run empty. We no longer have to spend $30 a month on water, nor go out into the street to find a truck that sells it to us.
A nearby neighborhood has also improved. They have never received water through pipes, but the municipal government is now sending them free water trucks. Will the service last? That’s the question that always hangs in the air in a country where instability and unpredictability are constants in daily life.
Read more from Caridad’s diary here on Havana Times.