Joaquin Menendez, 70, a childhood friend of Cesar Brioso Sr., gives Karen Branch-Brioso a tour of the carpentry shop Ismael Brioso owned until Fidel Castro took it over.

By Karen Branch-Brioso
The Tampa Tribune

HAVANA - Working from a scribbled list of addresses from my in-laws’ collective memories - some more than 40 years old - I doubted my ability to return to Tampa with the souvenir that would mean most to my husband:

A piece of his history.

Cesar left Havana as a 5-month-old in 1965. A history buff, he long has tried to piece together his own. He recorded interviews with relatives to capture their memories. He scanned sepia-toned family photos.

Now, on a reporting trip to Cuba for the Tribune, it was my turn to fill some gaps.

Many streets in Havana don’t have signs, even some of the elegant boulevards that run through the embassy district of Miramar. Add to that hardship the rumpled piece of paper with the list of homes where my in-laws had lived. Some had partial addresses with question marks next to them.

There was no address next to the listing of the clinic where Cesar was born.

But this was Cuba, where the best information always seems to come from the streets. Our driver got us to the weathered, central Havana neighborhood of Luyanó. A few stops to ask people on the street got us the rest of the way.

In a neighborhood of crumbling buildings that hadn’t seen a paint job in years, the Hija de Galicia clinic looked better cared for than most. Most of the blue paint on the outside was intact. The marble floors had a few cracks. Millions of footsteps had worn some of the bronze from the “H G 1957” embedded in the entry to the lobby. But the dual winding staircases leading to the second floor were set off by paintings of a doctor and a nurse against a brilliant sky-blue background.

My father-in-law’s brow wrinkled when I showed him the photos upon my return: “It’s completely deteriorated. It doesn’t look anything like when I left there.”

My father-in-law - Cesar Sr. - also didn’t recognize his cousins, Yolanda and Magaly, who had lived next door to him while growing up on Blanquizar Street.

“Who are you looking for?” a silver-haired woman called out to me from her front porch as I searched for my father-in-law’s old house number.

“They haven’t lived around here for 40 years,” I told her.

“What’s their name?”

“Brioso.”

“Yo soy Brioso,” said Yolanda Tellez Brioso, 66, tapping her chest with a finger. I’m Brioso. When I told her I was Cesar’s wife, she opened the steel-bar door of her front porch and welcomed me in.

Faces Of Strangers

She and her sister, Magaly, 65, introduced me to their abundant and vociferous collection of roosters, hens and dogs on their tiny back patio.

I showed them pictures of our 2-year-old son, Daniel. Then I pulled out my digital camera and showed them a photograph of Cesar. They searched his face for signs of his father - just as my father-in-law would search their photographs for signs of the twentysomething women he had known decades ago.

He couldn’t find them there.

He didn’t recognize his childhood home, either.

But when he saw the photographs of the carpentry shop next door, a startled look came to his face.

“The photographs of the shop looked like it did when I was there in 1959. Nothing had changed a bit,” he said. “I recognized it right away.”

For decades, Ismael Brioso - his uncle and Yolanda and Magaly’s grandfather - owned the carpentry shop on Blanquizar Street. Cesar’s grandfather, Rene Brioso, managed the place from the 1930s until the government took ownership of it after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. Yolanda said the government paid her mother some money for it.

My father-in-law had no idea it was still there.

The shop was idle that day, May 1, Cuba’s Labor Day holiday. But the doors were open. So many doors and windows in Havana are always open to let in the breeze at all hours of the day.

A neighbor, Joaquín Menendez, gave me a tour inside at Yolanda’s urging.

“Tell your father-in-law that I’m Chicho’s son,” Menendez, 70, said with a smile. “We played together when we were little.”

Some things, like the carpentry shop, haven’t changed much in Cuba.

My father-in-law said he and Joaquín played Cuba’s national sport - baseball - in the street when they were little.

“If we didn’t have baseballs or bats, we’d use broomsticks and balls that we’d make from cardboard cigarette boxes, tied into more or less a round ball,” he said.

While traveling around Havana that week, I saw baseball games like that every few blocks. Boys and even men batted away at makeshift baseballs: usually soda caps, or a handkerchief tied into a ball, or a rubber ball.

Such games went on long past dark in the Lawton neighborhood where my mother-in-law, María Luisa, moved as a child. Her mother moved her three children to Havana from a farm in Pinar del Río after her husband died of typhus.

They lived in a one-room apartment at the back of a home on 14th Street in Lawton.

‘The Government Lets You Ask Questions?’

Today, it is Emerita Torre’s home. The diminutive 89-year-old woman began to cry when I introduced myself. Cesar’s grandmother, she said, “is like a sister to me.”

My mother-in-law couldn’t remember the address of her first Havana home. That was one of the question marks on my list. But we needn’t have worried.

She had included the address for a cousin who lived down the street, Manuel Alvarez, a retired carpenter. He and his wife, Eva, welcomed me into their home with open arms - and a bit of surprise that I was in Cuba on a journalist visa: “The government just lets you come here and ask people questions?”

Manuel directed me to a pair of rocking chairs in the living room: “Tell your in-laws that you sat in the same chairs they broke in when they were dating.”

My in-laws didn’t recognize the chairs in the photographs I took. When my mother-in-law saw the photos of Manuel, she drew in a sharp breath: “He’s so skinny!”

When I met him, his build reminded me of the multitude of rail-thin bodies that startled me on my first trip to Cuba, back in 1994.

It was the “Special Period” - a few years after the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the end to its hefty subsidies to Cuba. Food shortages were widespread. Even soap was hard to find. Back then, I brought several bars of soap to give away. The reaction of one woman to the gift was unforgettable. She cradled the soap as if it were a bar of gold.

Soap is still rationed today: one bar per person per month. But soap isn’t nearly as scarce as it was then. And nowadays, super-lean bodies are even scarcer. Everywhere I went in Havana, examples abounded of bodies with a bit of paunch or well-rounded hips.

Manuel, my mother-in-law’s skinny cousin, is more the exception today than the rule.

He led me down the street to her former home. On the one-block stroll, we ran into two more cousins who weren’t on the list: Ramón Sánchez ("They call me Monguito.") And Jorge Goicolea, “El Chulo.” The nickname means “cutie.” He’s younger - 48 - than all the other cousins, who are in their mid-50s. He was 6 years old when Cesar left as an infant for the United States.

We returned to the neighborhood later to meet another cousin, Magaly Sánchez, because she’d been away at her job at a cigar tobacco distributor. She met me at Manuel’s house, carrying a plastic bag filled with memories. From it, she extracted a photograph of her with Cesar’s aunt Marta and his great-grandfather.

She startled me by pulling from the bag one of my wedding photos. Manuel’s sister from New York, Mirta, one of our wedding guests, gave it to her.

“You were thinner then,” Magaly noted.

There was no The-Special-Period-Is-Over excuse for me to fall back on.

She tearfully showed me a ring that Cesar’s grandmother had recently sent her through a friend traveling to Cuba. Her eyes also moistened as she showed me photographs of her 11-year-old grandson. He recently left Cuba to join his father, Gilberto - her only son - in Hialeah.

I took several photos of her. I could never get one where she smiled.

Magaly raced to make more memories as we talked. Mother’s Day was approaching, so she wrote Mother’s Day messages on postcards for every female in the family in Florida. The last one had my name on it.

Back in Tampa, I gave them to my mother-in-law and Cesar’s aunt Marta, who would deliver these latest family memories when they returned home to Miami.

I gave Marta the photo that Magaly had sent of the two of them, from decades before, standing on either side of Cesar’s great grandfather.

But Cesar borrowed it first. To make a copy of one more piece of his history.

Reporter Karen Branch-Brioso can be reached at (813) 259-7815 or at kbranch-brioso@tampatrib.com.

By KAREN BRANCH-BRIOSO
The Tampa Tribune

HAVANA - In her tiny home on a dirt road on the outskirts of this city, Ania Morales Terga has a Russian-made air-conditioning unit in the bedroom she shares with her two girls.

She has a clothes washer in the hallway.

She has ground beef in the freezer.

She has a cell phone.

None of this may mean much in West Tampa, where her husband, Gustavo González, now lives. But in Havana homes, air conditioners are rare. Many wash clothing by hand. Beef is only sold in the hard-currency grocery stores that don’t accept the Cuban pesos most people earn. Cell phones are reserved for businessmen, government officials or foreigners.

But Morales Terga has all these things thanks to remittances from relatives abroad that have become an integral way of life for many Cuban families.

The government provides free education and health care. It also provides its people with rationed basic goods for pesos or fractions of pesos - things such as rice, beans, cooking oil, cooking gas, 1 1/2 pounds of chicken per person per month, a bar of soap. But many goods are now available only with the help of hard currency that most people don’t earn.

Dollars are one way to get the hard-currency convertible pesos that are worth 25 regular pesos apiece. Cubans in the United States send about $460 million a year to family on the island, according to a 2005 poll of 1,000 Cuban-Americans conducted by the Coral Gables firm Bendixen & Associates.

Since González slipped out of Cuba on a boat in October after years of trying to flee, he has shipped everything from frozen meat to ballet toe shoes to money to his wife and his daughters. He is their sole provider.

“If you don’t have someone, it’s hard,” said Morales Terga, 36, a housewife.

While Gonzalez was in Cuba, the family received help from his brother, Jorge González, the owner of Arco Iris Restaurant in West Tampa. He bought the family their washer seven years ago.

The brother also sent money. Before he left Cuba, González used some of that money to get the cell phone that his wife uses. He couldn’t get one on his own, so he went to the Havana airport, asking foreigners to lend their name to open a cellular account. A Guatemalan man finally agreed. González gave him $15 for his efforts and paid $120 for the cell phone line.

Since arriving in Tampa, he sends his wife $100 a month.

The U.S. government, with its decades-long embargo of Cuba, strictly limits the amount that residents can send to family there to $100 a month per household. Tighter restrictions set by the Bush administration in 2004 limit that to immediate family: parents, siblings, spouses, children, grandparents and grandchildren. Before that, U.S. residents could send remittances to extended family - such as cousins, aunts and uncles - as well.

That $100 buys about 83 hard-currency converted pesos or about 2,100 pesos that Cubans can use for purchases. That’s about five times the average state salary in Cuba.

A Nephew’s Help
Nereida Avila Martínez, 77, earns far less than the average. She receives a retiree’s pension of 200 pesos a month, not even $10.

But she also relies heavily on the money sent by her nephew, Tampa lawyer Michael Misa.

“Michael helps me when he can,” she said in her central Havana apartment. “Thanks to him, I’m alive. I’m one of seven siblings, and now I’m the only one left. When my sister died, she told Michael, ‘Take care of Nereida.’”

And he has. Misa’s mother, Marina, who died in 2001, always helped out her family in Cuba. Misa said he continued that help since her death, even after the 2004 U.S. regulations said he couldn’t - because as a nephew and cousin, he’s not allowed.

“I assist my family in any way I can, whether it’s financial or medication,” said Misa, in a sometimes tearful interview in his Tampa law office. “To have family and ignore them - although there’s a redefinition of family members by our government - my aunt is still my family. I can’t do enough to help them.”

The 2004 restrictions also prohibited him from traveling to Cuba on a family visit, now limited to once every three years to immediate family only.

But he travels as often as he can under a Treasury Department humanitarian license to donate medical supplies to Cuba. He recently married a woman whose parents live there. So as a son-in-law, he is considered immediate family and can also travel for family visits with them.

Embargo Hurts
Misa sends money so his aunt can buy meat and other food that’s hard to get without convertible Cuban pesos, the hard currency. He sends her blood-pressure medications that are scarce at Cuban pharmacies. She is a borderline diabetic, so he bought her a blood-sugar testing kit.

In a tour of her apartment, Avila Martínez proudly pointed to a new appliance: “Michael bought the refrigerator.”

Back in Tampa, Misa smiles: “She had an old Soviet refrigerator from the ‘50s. I’d fixed it once before. But it wasn’t keeping the meat cold, so I bought her a new one.”

During one trip to Havana, Misa also helped a cousin:

“I bought her a washer because she was washing clothes by hand to make a living,” he said.

In another Havana neighborhood, Rafael, 71, a retiree whose daughter lives in Tampa, said Cuba has economic difficulties, in part due to the U.S. embargo. Rafael and his wife, Margarita, agreed to be interviewed only if The Tampa Tribune did not use their surnames. They feared the Cuban government was following Tribune journalists and there would be repercussions for anyone who appeared in their articles.

“We have to buy food in China, India and Vietnam, and that makes the cost of transporting food very expensive,” Rafael said.

“If we bought from the United States, it would be half the cost.”

Rafael began fighting in Fidel Castro’s revolutionary armed forces in 1958, the year before Castro came to power. He retired in 1985 as a lieutenant colonel who worked as a technician on MiG fighter jets.

The government pays him an above-average pension: 450 pesos a month, almost $22.

His wife, Margarita, 64, earns a 205-peso pension as a retired adult-education teacher.

She has scoliosis - curvature of the spine - and says all doctors’ visits, hospital admissions and physical therapy are free:

“Any hospital you go to, they’ll take care of you,” Margarita said.

“That’s why we live well,” Rafael said.

Another reason they live well is the $100 a month they receive from their daughter and son-in-law in Tampa. That’s more than three times the value of their collective pensions.

They use those dollars to buy things such as the pile of cement bags on their patio that they’re using to repair their kitchen. It takes hard currency to buy things such as cement.

Asylum Denied
For Rafael and Margarita, their relatives’ help provides foods that are scarce and extras such as the cement.

It doesn’t provide them with frequent face-to-face visits with their family. The U.S. government once allowed extended family to have once-a-year visits. The recent stricter limits imposed by the Bush administration allow only immediate relatives to make family visits, and then only once every three years. So Margarita went to the U.S. Interests Section on April 2 to try to get a visa to go to Tampa to visit her daughter and grandson. It was denied.

“They told me, ‘You’re a possible immigrant. It would be hard for you to get a visa,’ Margarita said, surprised at the suggestion. “But I have two other children here and more grandchildren here.”

Morales Terga said she was shocked when the U.S. Interests Section turned down her husband’s political asylum application in Havana.

“With all the problems that he’s had, I couldn’t believe their answer,” Morales Terga said. “The police were always looking for him - just for trying to leave.”

Before González fled on a raft fashioned from oil drums and an outboard motor in October, the family relied on help from his brother in Tampa to supplement the money they made under the table.

Morales Terga made food at home. Her husband, who lost his state job as a truck driver after making several attempts to leave the country, sold the food to vendors outside a church nearby.

Today, he works at his brother’s restaurant, and from that sends his wife food packages and $100 a month.

“It bothers me a little bit to send the money, because in one way or another, I’m helping the regime,” González said.

“But family sentiments come first. I don’t want my girls to starve. And my wife is a wonderful mother to my girls, and I have to help her economically.”

Reporter Karen Branch-Brioso can be reached at (813) 259-7815 or kbranch-brioso@tampatrib.com.

Audio Slide Show
Video Report
Internet Access In Cuba

By Karen Branch-Brioso
The Tampa Tribune

HAVANA - Jose Antonio Torres, an orthopedic hospital nurse, is off-duty. Officially.

Unofficially, the 28-year-old is waiting for a client in one of two unlicensed jobs he works to feed his three children, with a fourth on the way.

He’s supposed to have a state license to charge people for rides on his bicycle taxi. But a license and taxes for the self-employed can be hard to get and cut deeply into profits. So he’s running his side business por la izquierda. Literally, “to the left.” “Under the table” is a better translation for the way many Cubans get by these days.

Even licensed bicitaxis aren’t allowed to give foreigners a ride. But Torres says he’ll do that - in a downpour: “If it’s raining, I’ll take a tourist because the police duck indoors.”

The hard currency that foreigners pay him makes it worth the risk.

Getting access to such currency is another thing. So Cubans try different methods.

Some stick to state-salaried jobs or pensions and hope for occasional help from a relative abroad. Some ditch beloved careers for tourism jobs that bring in foreign currency-based tips, multiplying their income several times over. Others seek the limited government licenses to run their own businesses, earning more than most state-salaried jobs.

Or people such as Torres work multiple jobs. Sometimes with the state’s blessing, but often not.

He makes 441 pesos a month - barely $20 - as a nurse. He makes 100 pesos a morning delivering food ingredients for a small, family-run restaurant and tries to make an additional 200 pesos a day in taxi fares. A tourist paying with hard currency gets him there much quicker.

Cubans navigate between two currencies. They earn salaries in pesos - worth about a nickel each - and use them to pay for basics such as rice, utilities, fruits and vegetables. Then there are Cuban convertible pesos, called “CUCs” for their Spanish-language acronym. When foreigners exchange currency, that’s what they get.

More and more establishments, such as restaurants, hotels, taxis, entertainment venues, department and well-stocked grocery stores, accept only CUCs. Each is worth 25 times the regular peso’s value, or about $1.20.

For many families, hard currency - such as dollars - from relatives abroad helps them get CUCs to buy products impossible to find with regular pesos. Beef, for example, is sold only in hard-currency stores. Same for electronics and hair products.

The U.S. government, with its decades-long embargo against the communist nation, strictly limits the money its residents can send to family in Cuba. In 2004, the Bush administration tightened the purse strings even more. A U.S. resident can send just $100 a month to a household. Before, extended families could contribute up to $100 per relative. Now, only immediate family can legally send money.

Later that year, the Cuban government banned the use of U.S. dollars in retail stores, requiring them to be exchanged into Cuban currency.

Even the $100 limit can have a significant effect. That’s nearly 2,100 Cuban pesos, more than triple what a Cuban doctor makes in a month.

Without such help, some say they couldn’t make it.

Nereida Avila Martínez, 77, has family in Tampa that has helped her out over the years. Otherwise, her only income is a 200-peso retirement pension - less than $9 a month.

“Thanks to them, I survive,” Avila Martínez said in her Havana apartment.

Torres, the nurse with three jobs, has a brother in New Orleans. They aren’t in contact, so he doesn’t have access to dollars through that means. He says remittances sometimes can create tensions between the have-dollars and have-none.

“There are a lot of families who depend on remittances,” Torres said. “There are pros and cons to it. There’s jealousy of those who don’t work, who live off nothing but air. You should work, even if you can afford more comforts because you receive dollars.”

In neighborhood corner stores, Cubans pay fixed prices for a set amount of basic goods that are rationed for pennies. Items such as rice - less than 2 cents a pound. Chicken - 3 pennies a pound.

Elsewhere, the prices are more malleable, depending on where you’re from. Or what you can afford. For the same ride on his bicitaxi, Torres will charge a Cuban national 60 pesos, or $2.88. He’ll charge a tourist $5.

The Self-Employed

Most of the roughly 170,000 cuentapropistas - the self-employed folks blessed by the state with licenses to run small businesses - earn their money in pesos. But they earn more of them than their state-salaried counterparts, enabling them to buy into hard currency.

Jose Angel Martinella, 45, recently joined that group.

His office is a table piled high with fruits, vegetables and beans in the cool, shaded confines of a farmers market. No more work in the sweltering sun. That ended four months ago when he quit his job on a street cleanup crew. The ripened guavas he sells for a peso - or two or three, depending on their size - perfume the air around him.

Then there’s the money.

He takes home 800 pesos a month: triple his street-cleaning wages and four times what he made before that as a member of Cuba’s national judo team. But even with an income of about $38 - a decent sum by state-salary standards - life’s not easy.

Martinella fondly reminisces on his years as an athlete: “Wages were low, but they gave us everything. You didn’t pay for anything: housing, food, transportation. Now I have to pay for food, for the bus.”

He has another expense as a cuentapropista. He pays as much as 125 pesos a month in taxes.

‘This Is My Life’

Carmen Arias Leyva styles only Cuban hair in her Old Havana beauty shop. No tourists. She is prohibited under the state license she has had to run the shop for 18 years. But sometimes prices differ among her Cuban clients. She’ll charge more from those who earn more.

“I charge what they can afford to pay,” said Arias Leyva, 51, as she dabbed a reddish tint to the roots of Rosa María Marrero, a lab technician who makes 360 pesos a month.

Then it was Mayelín Pantoja Hernández’s turn in the chair for highlights. The computer engineering student teaches Web site production for 370 pesos a month.

“They earn very little, so I’ll charge her 60 pesos for highlights,” Arias Leyva said. “And for roots, I’ll charge her 60 pesos. A haircut is 10 pesos. I can’t charge more. They can’t afford it.”

She said she’s not tempted to take in tourists, who must go to state-run salons that charge convertible pesos for services: “If I fix a foreigner’s hair, an inspector would show up and take my license away.”

Though she charges in pesos, the hair products she uses - peroxide, hair color, even shampoo and conditioner - are available only at stores that accept convertible pesos. That makes overhead high. She wouldn’t change her career over it.

“This is my life,” she said, surveying her one-room salon, barely a foyer that gives way to a large, well-kept apartment she shares with her husband and adult son. “It’s what I love to do.”

Free Education, Health Care

Across Havana, plenty of people such as Arias Leyva stick to doing what they love, despite the wages.

At the lunchroom at Camilo Cienfuegos National Primary School on a recent afternoon, María Rosa Fajardo’s first-graders squealed with delight as she led them in an impromptu merengue lesson. She makes 450 pesos a month, about $21. For a dozen years, she has taught in the free education system. Before that, she was a beneficiary, earning a teaching degree free.

Even postgraduate education is free. Jorge Morales, 47, an obstetrician in central Havana’s Luis de la Uceta Polyclinic, didn’t pay a penny to earn his medical degree and his specialty. He was able to choose his specialty as an obstetrician because he served three postgraduate years caring for patients in a rural mountain region of eastern Cuba, where doctors were scarce.

He works six days a week for 600 pesos, less than $30 - far less than those earning tourist tips. He teaches medical students on Saturdays. He does ultrasounds and exams in a cramped room at the clinic. He makes house calls. He performs surgery - abortions on Fridays. Once every six days, he pulls a 24-hour shift at a hospital.

“All health care is free. Surgery, too,” Morales said. “And when a doctor orders you a treatment, that’s free.”

Despite the lower pay and long hours, he’s proud that his 26-year-old daughter is following in his footsteps.

The Cost Of Survival

Many, however, don’t necessarily do what they love.

Electronic specialists who would prefer to tinker with gadgets are instead driving tourists around to make a better living.

After earning his degree as a mechanical engineer in 1980, Orlando Vaillant went to work as a professor for 400 pesos a month. The salary was good then, when the Soviet Union heavily subsidized the Cuban government. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, that changed.

Subsidized petroleum from the Soviet Union evaporated, leading to a crisis in Cuban agricultural production that was heavily dependent on fuel. The island went through what leader Fidel Castro referred to as the “Special Period,” with widespread food shortages.

Cuban waistlines shrank. So did their buying power.

“Four hundred pesos was a good salary from 1980 through 1992,” said Vaillant, 58. “Then came the Special Period, and the peso was trading 100 pesos to the U.S. dollar. It wasn’t enough.”

He left for Jamaica in 1995, where his Jamaican-born mother lived. He made connections with tourism agencies. Then he returned to Havana in 2000 with Cuba’s economy improving - but not so much to make a professor’s or a mechanical engineer’s salary as lucrative as a career in Cuba’s top industry: tourism.

He bought a car in his mother’s name because most Cubans can’t get government authorization to buy a car - unless they’re famous doctors, athletes or artists. But foreigners can.

Vaillant uses the car to give city tours at $8 an hour.

“This has helped me to survive - me and my family,” Vaillant said.

He makes about $400 a month. Por la izquierda.

Reporter Karen Branch-Brioso can be reached at kbranch-brioso@tampatrib .com or (813) 259-7815.

CUBAN SALARIES

The $100 per month that U.S. residents can send to immediate family translates into about 2,100 Cuban pesos. Below are the monthly salaries quoted to The Tampa Tribune by Cubans drawing government salaries.

Policeman: 870 pesos

Obstetrician/gynecologist: 600 pesos

First-grade teacher: 450 pesos

Nurse: 441 pesos

Lab analyst: 360 pesos

House painter: 305 pesos

MAKING A LIVING AS A HAIRDRESSER

Carmen Arias Leyva, 51, has been a hairdresser for 30 years in Havana - the past 18 years as the self-employed owner of Peluquería Carmen. Here is a look at her income and some expenses, much of which she must pay for in convertible pesos.

Her income varies with the flow of her clientele, who can be only Cubans, paying her in pesos.

“I make 300 to 400 pesos a month, but around holidays like Mother’s Day I can earn more - 600 or 700 pesos a month.”

Arias Leyva has “owned” the roomy apartment behind her small one-room salon for decades. Cubans pay a mortgage of sorts - in pesos - to the government. Once Arias Leyva pays off her 6,000-peso mortgage, about $288, she’ll have the right to pass it on to her son when she dies. When that happens, the government will begin assessing another mortgage against her son. Often, it’s less than the original mortgage.

When Cubans leave the country, they are required to pay off any outstanding mortgages - and they don’t always have the right to pass the property on to a family member when they go.

Monthly after-tax income: 300 to 700 pesos - $14.50 to $33.60

Monthly income taxes: 400 pesos - $19.20

Mortgage: 80 pesos - $3.84

Bottle of shampoo or conditioner: 1 convertible peso - $1.20

Hair color: 2.30 convertible pesos - $2.76

Highlights: 1.25 convertible pesos - $1.50

Peroxide: 1.20 convertible pesos - $1.44

Cuba is a place of parallel worlds and parallel currencies.

Crumbling buildings with peeling paint that Cubans call home stand side-by-side with painstakingly restored, artfully colorful edifices where only those with access to foreign currency can afford to stay.

The 1940s- and ’50s-era jalopies held together by who-knows-what drive past post offices equipped with sleek public computer terminals offering e-mail access.

Closed off from the United States in many ways, Cubans open themselves up to each other every hour of the day. With air conditioners and clothes dryers a luxury, they throw open windows.

They air their clean laundry to the world. With limited access to cable TV that keeps people in other climate-controlled worlds indoors, neighbors talk — from window to open window. They mingle on front steps after work, where they earn salaries that allow them to buy necessities at government-rationed prices — but not much else.

In every neighborhood, children hit the streets to play sports — volleyball, soccer, but mostly baseball — with whatever facsimile of equipment that will allow them to play a game.

With few able or allowed to buy cars, they travel pressed together in public buses. Or, they climb into horse-drawn carts in the city’s outskirts.

Tribune reporter Karen Branch-Brioso and photographer Chris Urso spent last week in Cuba.

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