Havana/In a city practically stopped, there are those who do not stop. You can see them crossing the empty streets, avoiding the potholes on the Malecón or pedaling uphill through Tulipán with a backpack on their backs. They do not wear a uniform nor do they have a work contract, but they carry a good part of Havana’s economy on wheels. They are the young people of delivery, a generation that in these days of fuel scarcity becomes essential in the transfer of goods.
Yasiel, 26, delivers pizzas, medicines and small packages. The orders come to him via WhatsApp from private businesses in the Cuban capital, desperate due to the lack of couriers with gasoline cars or motorcycles. Sometimes they ask for flowers, a cake or even a basin to bathe a baby. “Whatever can be loaded on the grill,” he tells 14ymedio while he adjusts the bags that he will deliver to various points in the city on his bicycle. He does not have a self-employment license nor does he belong to any MSME, but he earns more than many professionals. “If I work twelve hours I can make more than 5,000 pesos a day, although it is quite hard.”
This Friday night, when only a few electric tricycles and some pedestrians were traveling along Rancho Boyeros Avenue, who preferred to walk on the asphalt than on the neglected sidewalks, Yasiel continued making deliveries. A huge backpack hung on his back and another, even larger one, on his chest. It came from the Playa municipality, near the Almendares River, to the Nuevo Vedado area. “I’m exhausted because I haven’t stopped pedaling today. Can you give me a glass of water?” he told one of his clients, almost on the verge of fainting.
The company for which Yasiel was making the delivery, one of the many that has digital sites where emigrants buy food and other basic supplies from their relatives on the Island, “is liquidating its merchandise in the face of what is coming,” says the young man. The trade on-line has launched a 15% discount offer on all its products and “if they are frozen you can get them for up to 25% less,” he details. Fearing that blackouts will become longer every day, “many people are avoiding buying what needs refrigeration.”
“For the first time since I’ve been working on this, I haven’t moved a single package of frozen chicken quarters today.”
This Friday, the shipments that Yasiel delivered were mainly canned goods, grains and cookies. “There were chickpea knobs that looked like they had been in the warehouse for a while because of the dust on top.” Packages of flour, sardines, tuna, powdered milk, cereals, vegetable oil and the helpful cans of spam They completed the assignments. “For the first time since I’ve been working on this, I haven’t moved a single package of frozen chicken quarters today.” No one wants a lack of power to turn their food into a stinking puddle of water and blood.
In Telegram groups with names like Delivery Habana 24/7 or Messengers de Plaza, orders, routes and clients are shared. Sometimes also warnings: “don’t go through Infanta, which is a wolf’s mouth because of the blackout.” They are work forums, but also havens of camaraderie. “Here we notify each other when a business is asking for people, when there is a lack of power or if a street is closed due to a march. We are like a brotherhood, but without headquarters,” explains Yasiel.
The bicycle taxi of Marcos, 34 years old and nicknamed The Wheels, It has been transporting “more food than people” for weeks. Arriving from distant Banes, this Holguin native has been doing several passenger transfer routes between Centro Habana, Cerro and Old Havana for five years. At the beginning of February he received a call from a friend who works for a digital site that delivers everything from food to hardware supplies. “He told me that they needed electric bicycles or motorcycles because they had fewer and fewer cars due to the gasoline problem.”
Since then, Marcos has “combed Havana” from one side to the other, transporting sausages, soft drinks, butter and everything else a Cuban émigré buys in Miami, Berlin or Madrid to his family on the island. “I have been lucky and, in addition to what they pay me, I have received good tips because when people see me arrive in the pedicab they put their hand in their pocket to give me something.” Where others fear a worsening of the fuel crisis, the man from Holguín sees his niche: “now it is the turn of those of us who do not need oil or electricity.”
“These are times when you have to be very alert because people know that we are delivering food and things paid for in foreign currency, we are a focus when we do that”
The day he remembers with greatest gratitude was last Monday when he brought “coffee and some of those catheters used for bedridden patients to urinate” to a house in the Sports Casino. “The old lady who greeted me gave me a tip fula“, he remembers. That same day the US dollar was close to 500 Cuban pesos in the informal market. “It is because of things like this that I continue in this job, although there are also bitter moments.”
In the darkness of a street in the Cerro neighborhood, Marcos watches over his shoulders while he dispatches one of the orders. With the flashlight of his cell phone, he checks the sheet that describes a list of products that a digital store has processed for a Havana family. “These are times when you have to be very alert because people know that we are delivering food and things paid for in foreign currency, we are a focus when we do that.” To avoid subsequent complaints and claims, each product must be checked against the list in front of the recipient, an operation that delays and increases dangers.
In addition to the assaults, Marcos’ biggest fear was, until this week, “that the strong heat will come and it will no longer be so easy to pedal from here to there.” However, in the last few hours he has received the cancellation of three orders and that opens up new fears. “There are several of those digital sites that are closing orders from outside because they can no longer guarantee their delivery, this is getting ugly.” If you buy them on-line They paralyze, it doesn’t matter how much force the messenger’s calves exert on the pedicab: “I’ll have to move people again and with real customers things get complicated.”
The rise of delivery Informal grew with the energy crisis and the collapse of state transportation, but had its moment of greatest explosion in the covid-19 pandemic. Now, with the almost disappearance of fuel on the Island, after the executive order signed by Donald Trump that penalizes countries that send crude oil to Cuba with tariffs, the gasoline or diesel vehicles in circulation are becoming fewer and fewer and electric tricycles cannot cope. In this void, motorcycles and bicycles try to fill the void that has been left to transport goods.
“Sometimes it unloads in the dark, and I have to push the tricycle to a place where I can load it”
“Before I worked in a refrigeration workshop, but this gives me more time,” Landy, 30, who coordinates a network of ten couriers, tells this newspaper. Its “central” is a WhatsApp chat. “They write to me from MSMEs, I give them the address and calculate the commission. There is no boss or fixed schedule. If there is no connection, I disconnect and that’s it.” With each trip, the courier earns between 1,000 and 1,500 pesos, depending on the distance. “There is no contract, but there is a word,” adds the entrepreneur. “My commission is paid to me at the end of the day, depending on the trips they have given.”
The majority are young men, although there are also women. Some are university students, computer scientists or engineers. They all try to earn some money to support their families and also prefer the independence of not being tied to a state job and being able to work with several businesses at the same time. “I don’t want anyone to boss me around, I take an order when I need it and when I don’t want to I stay at home,” summarizes a 23-year-old delivery man with an electric tricycle: “My boss is the battery.”
The job is full of risks. “Sometimes it is unloaded in the middle of the dark, and I have to push the tricycle to a place where I can load it,” explains a young man from San Miguel del Padrón who makes deliveries in what he calls “a complicated area.” With gloves, a helmet and a black jacket that bears the “Rider” badge on the back, he distributes orders from small businesses in the municipality, but also receives orders from larger digital sites.
The main of these businesses on-line has announced that it is canceling all its orders starting this Friday. Supermarket, which had managed to extend its deliveries throughout almost the entire Island, informed its customers that it will only process orders already received. “Due to the current situation of fuel availability in Cuba, our logistics operations have been temporarily limited,” reads its website.
Yasiel doesn’t let worry paralyze him when faced with announcements like that. For this Saturday his agenda is full of deliveries. “It’s Valentine’s Day and I’m not going to stop pedaling, I’ll rest tomorrow.” The future is something you avoid thinking about in a country where announcements of cancellations, closures and interruptions happen every day.
