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.

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