Rich Cubans belie nation’s ‘starkly poor’ image

It’s Saturday night at El Cocinero, a chic rooftop bar that has arguably become Havana’s hippest watering hole in the year since it opened, and there’s no getting in without a reservation. There are plenty of foreigners, but also not a few sharp-dressed Cubans lounging in the butterfly chairs, sipping $3 mojitos and talking art, culture and politics. It’s an image that stands in stark contrast to common perceptions overseas of Communist Cuba as a poor country where nobody has the disposable income to blow on a night out. ‘Where they get the money from, I don’t know, and I don’t have a crystal ball,’ said one of the Cubans at the bar, Lilian Triana, a 31-year-old economist who works for the local offices of Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA. She suggested some may have relatives sending money from abroad. Havana is seeing a boom in stylish, privately run bars and clubs like El Cocinero, evidence of a small but growing class of relatively affluent artists, musicians and entrepreneurs on an island where many people earn about $20 a month and depend on subsidized food, housing and transport to get by.