Lines stretched for blocks outside phone centers on Monday as the government allowed ordinary Cubans to sign up for cellular phone service for the first time.
The contracts cost about US$120 to activate — half a year’s wages on the average state salary. And that does not include a phone or credit to make and receive calls.
“Everyone wants to be first to sign up,” said Usan Astorga, a 19-year-old medical student who stood for about 20 minutes before her line moved at all.
Getting through the day without a cellphone is unthinkable now in most developed countries, but Cuba’s government limited access to mobile phones and other so-called luxuries in an attempt to preserve the relative economic equality that is a hallmark of life on the communist-run island.
Cuban President Raul Castro has done away with several other small but infuriating restrictions, and his popularity has surged as a result — defusing questions about his relative lack of charisma after his ailing older brother Fidel formally stepped down in February.
An article on Friday in the Communist Party newspaper Granma said it was Fidel Castro’s idea all along to lift bans on mobile phones, and that he was behind recent government orders easing restrictions that had prevented most Cubans from staying in hotels, renting cars, enjoying beaches reserved for tourists and buying DVD players and other consumer goods.
In the latest change, Orlando Lugo, president of the official National Association of Small Farmers, said on Monday night on state television that small farmers can now freely buy formerly controlled agricultural tools such as machetes, wire, boots and herbicide. He said the government is also examining new ways for farmers to commercialize goods.
“They are part of a process initiated and called for by Fidel,” Granma said of the recent changes.
Fidel Castro has not been seen in public since undergoing emergency intestinal surgery in July 2006, but he has continued to pen essays every few days. He wrote on Saturday that the country may be going too far in easing some restrictions.
“As in Cuba, there are those with theories about easy access to consumer goods,” he wrote, dismissing those people as “imperial ears and eyes hungry for these dreams.”
Cuba’s state-controlled telecommunications monopoly, a joint venture with Telecom Italia, charges US$2.70 per minute to call the US and US$5.85 per minute to Europe and most of the rest of the world. Making or receiving local calls costs US$0.30 a minute.
Only foreigners and Cubans holding key government posts had been allowed to have cellphones since they first appeared in the country in 1991.
Thousands of ordinary Cubans already had mobile phones through the black market, but could activate them only if foreigners agreed to lend their names to the contracts.
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