‘Camel’ Caravans Hit Stride in Cuba
HAVANA - Spring,1999 It is a sun stifled Sunday morning, and thousands of city residents are scrambling to get to the public beach 10 miles east of downtown.
Since private cars are rare, most Cubans rely on public transportation. But in this capital of two million, buses can seem as numerous as oases in the desert. And so the government's unique solution: "camels" on wheels.
And here comes one of the strangely shaped people movers, its hulking 35-foot-long frame a menace among Old Havana's bicycle taxis, and classic land-shark American cars. The humps are faded pink steel, its snort a sooty black exhaust, its innards stuffed with passengers, and its head a Ford L-9000 tractor-trailer rig. It is hip-to-hip humanity on wheels, packed so tightly that conductors at times must shove newcomers aboard.
And for the equivalent of a penny, it is a ride to the beach. "A Cuban solution to a Cuban problem," said a smiling Luis Guintin director of the state Center for the Investigation and Development of Transportation.
In the early '90s, when the Soviet Union fell, fuel subsidies were among the billions in aid that stopped flowing to Cuba. As the Cuban economy contracted by 40 percent, the government downgraded plans for a subway system and looked to develop an alternative transportation option called the "supertrenbus."
To conserve metal, Guintin said, designers lowered the roof in the middle of the cavernous passenger cabin, giving the vehicles their likeness to the two-humped Bactrian beasts of burden. By 1995, an initial caravan of "camellos" hit Havana's streets.
If form follows function, the vehicles symbolize how dysfunctional Cuba's public transport has become. In 1989, Havaneros took four million trips each day, Guintin said. This year, the daily total is one million trips. Forty percent of these passengers are on the camels that rumble through the city via seven routes, each a 15-mile route that takes an hour.
No one can agree on a camel's capacity. Guintin asserts that each can carry no more than 220 riders; one driver scoffed at that guess, offering an estimate of 300. Tour guides joke that no one will ever be able to untangle the true count.
Whatever the number, camels are often miserably stuffed. On this particular Sunday, its seems the whole city is dying for a spot on the M1 line from Old Havana to the beach near Alamar.
After collecting its downtown passengers, the camal speeds into the tunnel at the mouth of Havana harbor, thick exhaust choking into the cabin. Minutes later at a stop in East Havana the conductor jumps off and packs more passengers into the suffocating cabin.
"Let's go let's go," he demands. "Slowly, slowly," appeals a doddering man with a stumpy cigar dangling from his mouth. But there is no room for him and barely enough for a thin man who as the bus grinds away refuses to release his grip. Because he is hanging outside the cabin, the doors don't close. No one gawks-it's not unusual.
The return trip from the beach is no less brutal. Those waiting seek small patches of shade amid the gray 12-story apartment blocks in Alamar that residents unsentimentally call 'Siberia," owing to their Soviet workmanship. By mid-afternoon, the crowd awaiting transport already is several hundred deep.
Cubans are so accustomed to waiting in line that they have turned the chore into an art. Upon arriving at any queue, a person asks for "el ultrimo," the last in line. The sequence spreads out in no apparent order, but everyone seems to know his place. How quickly they forget once a camel arrives.
The sun-baked passengers in Alamar hop up in unison and crush toward the three doors on the vehicle's right side. Police try to regulate the flow. But like water running downhill, would-be passengers squirt around the outside of their barrier.
The goal is the ticket seller leaning out a side window, and once passengers have a ticket they forge up the steps and into the packed cabin. Thirty seconds later, those trying to disembark wiggle their way out.
More people crush in. Those with friends already aboard opt to get hoisted up 10 feet through a side window. A conductor signals the driver with a bell and the hinged doors creak and clank shut.
Like most of the absurdities of Cuban society, camels often are the target of humor.
One joke likens the ride to scenes in the American movies that rivet Cuban TV audiences every Saturday night. The punch line: both are full of sex, violence, and profanity. Sex is the sweaty mass that gyrates at every traffic circle and bus stop, and violence the struggle to get on and off. The profanity, almost always good-natured, is hard to miss.
At present, 220 camels roam Havana's streets, according to Guintin, camels are made outside Havana for $30,000 each. The main problem is maintenance.
At the end of each line lies a camel yard where workers keep the vehicles running. At one yard, a driver named Gilberto bemoans the lack of spare parts -it's hard to get supplies for the US-built motors and cabins because of the American ecomomic embargo.
But perhaps the greater challenge, Gilberto says, is maneuvering a camel through the streets of Havana. Driving, really, requires a great effort," Guintin said.
Asked about that effort, Gilberto just laughs.
(another version of this story was printed in the Baltimore Sun, Houston Chronicle and San Francisco Chronicle).
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