HAVANA, Cuba — Tatiana Gonzalez stood transfixed before the glass display case watching a single cellphone spin around on a carousel at the government-run store. It was a Nokia 1112, a simple, boxy gray workhorse of mobile telecommunications technology — and Gonzalez was in love.
She coveted that phone. She confessed she had dreamed of that phone. But she would have to wait a little longer before she could cradle it to her ear.
How much longer? “I hope a year, no more,” said Gonzalez, who toils as a manager of medical records in a hospital, earning $21.44 a month.
That Nokia 1112? The government is offering the phone, charger included, for $58.
This is the hard math of the Cuban revolution, as it celebrates its 50th anniversary and a rickety state-run socialist economy struggles not only to feed, house and care for its people but also to offer them a nibble of global consumer culture.
In his first year as president, Raul Castro has added a few items to the menu of island life. Since taking over from his ailing older brother, Fidel, Raul has decided that Cubans can now, legally, purchase once-forbidden fruit, such as DVD players, microwave ovens, desktop computers and mobile phones. It is an experiment that Havana residents have embraced — especially the cellphones. They’re crazy for them.
Everyone agrees a microwave is a useful tool, but a cellphone is the icon of modernity. Since Castro began allowing the purchases in April, and then slashed prices in half in December, mobile phones have become the new status symbol in proletarian Havana, but with a Cuban twist. Cubans don’t actually talk on their cellphones. They use them as pagers.
“I never talk on mine. Never, never. If I talk, I talk because it’s almost like an emergency, and even then, I talk for a minute, that’s it,” said Vladimiro Perez, who stirs mojitos at a swank hotel bar in Old Havana and earns a pittance in salary but hundreds of dollars more in tips from the Canadian and European tourists.
The United States entered and exited the age of the beeper in the 1980s, but Cuba has just arrived at it. All over Havana, people look at the cellphones instead of speaking into them.
When Perez and other Cubans get a call, they rarely answer. Instead, they look at the number, find a land-line telephone — ubiquitous and dirt cheap to use — and return the call. If they’re feeling flush, they might type a message.
“We just type,” explained Perez, wagging his finger. “No talk.”
The Cuban government has not released official tallies of cellphone users, though a person who works in the technology field in Havana estimated that there were no more than 250,000 users in a nation of 11.2 million.But the price of minutes in Cuba is cruel. Local calls between cellphones cost 65 cents a minute. But texting, at 17 cents a message, is popular.
A Cuban with a BlackBerry explained that like the United States and Europe, Cuban society will be changed by the cellphone. “We will be reachable,” said the man. “But we don’t want to answer.”
