“Everyone is doing it, selling the belongings of family members who have emigrated”
14ymedio, Natalia López Moya, Havana, 3 November 2024 — They arrive early; some spread a blanket but others simply used the stairs of a building to spread their goods. The flea market on the corner of Loma and Tulipán, in Nuevo Vedado, brings together dozens of residents every weekend. They are eager to make some money from the sale of used clothes and other belongings, mostly left behind by those who emigrated.
“I have baby and women’s shoes, plates, cutlery and some ornaments for the house,” offers Mirta, 75, a former radio worker currently retired with a pension of 1,600 pesos per month. “They are things that belonged to my daughter and my grandson who left in June,” she explains to 14ymedio. “But I haven’t sold much in the three Saturdays I’ve been coming,” she acknowledges
After ten in the morning, you can barely take a step on the access stairs to the park in front of two concrete blocks, 20 floors each. The buildings were built at a time when the Soviet subsidy allowed the rise of the microbrigade movement that left a permanent mark in Nuevo Vedado. But from those times only the huge buildings that are increasingly deteriorated remain.
I live right here, so I just have to walk a little, and as I arrive early, I choose a place where my products have more visibility from the sidewalk,” says Mirta. “What sells the most right now are suitcases, backpacks, coats and well-made sneakers. Everything that can be used to travel the route of the volcanoes (between Nicaragua and Mexico, to get to the United States) or go somewhere else is in demand, but the other things do not sell very much.”
The merchants start arriving at half past eight in the morning, every Saturday. “There are those who have more patience and stay until two or three in the afternoon, but others lose hope, and if they don’t sell much they leave at noon,” the woman explains. “It also depends on whether rain is coming or if there is a blackout, because on days when there is no electricity many people come down from the buildings because of the heat, and that increases the clientele.”
“At first you had to ask for a credential to sell, but now everything is more flexible. Anyone who comes can ask a neighbor, a school teacher, who is responsible for organizing this, to get assigned a space to put things down. There are even people who arrive and simply look for an empty space and put their goods down right there. No one objects,” adds Mirta.
The credential, a piece of handwritten cardboard, only has the name of the merchant, and in the time that Mirta has been bringing her products to the park “no one has come to check it,”or to see if she has it. “It’s a pure formality because everyone knows that those of us who sell here are not going to get rich; this is for daily survival, to eat.”
Near Mirta’s improvised point of sale, Manuel, 77 years old, has unfolded a colorful carpet from the time when, through his work in a cultural entity, he visited Peru with an official delegation. The carpet, in which diamonds, triangles and lines of different tones alternate, “is also for sale,” he says, but he retains his state employment. “From Monday to Friday I go to work and on weekends I’m here.”
Manuel’s goods are very diverse. Some wooden hookahs from when he still smoked, before a prostate cancer put him almost on the verge of death and convinced him to quit “certain bad habits,” he tells this newspaper. He also has many books of the boom period in Latin American literature that he has accumulated for more than half a century. “There are some first editions. If you buy more than one we can come to an arrangement,” he explains to a young man who approaches.
Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Alejo Carpentier and Juan Gelman are some of the names on the volumes. Right next to them, a sequence of used office supplies underlines the fact that Manuel’s is the sale of an intellectual. “The university degree, the academic publications and the official events have been of little use to me because here I am,” he says.
Manuel has a daughter in Mexico but prefers not to ask her for “even a penny.” The young woman, newly married and with a small child, “already has her own problems. She can’t blame herself for not being able to support, in addition, an old man in Cuba.” So he is selling everything that once had some professional or personal value in his life: “That lighter was a gift from Nicolás Guillén; he used this frame with glass for his university diploma, and that bookmark was given to me in the National Library for a Day of the Librarian.”
Every little thing on Manuel’s carpet has a story, but he prefers to think about what he could buy if he manages to sell them. “I almost have enough for a carton of eggs, which is now more than 3,000 pesos, so if I manage to sell these boots, some rings of my wife that are quite beautiful and this frying pan, that’s enough for me.” But after two hours, he has barely managed to sell some kitchen handles and a doorbell button.
Now it’s almost noon, and on the steps and walls there’s no room for one more piece of merchandise on display. In the crowded flea market there are dresses, jeans, baby shoes, flip-flops, women’s bags, radios, hair dryers, headphones, casserole dishes, ornaments and trinkets. “Everything is washed and clean,” says an old woman who sees a couple showing interest in some children’s pants.
“They were from my grandson who took great care of things,” adds the woman who hurries to say that “he now lives in Seville, with his parents. Everything they left me here is of very good quality, imported clothing, well-made.” Most people who approach just look. “Today sales are bad because word of this place has now spread, and there are more and more people selling. It’s already saturated with products,” she sighs.
To pass the time, two nearby vendors share a little coffee they have brought in a thermos, another tells a woman selling children’s toys and sewing accessories to look after her wares because she has to go to the bathroom. Tied between two trees, a newly hung rope serves as a hanger for another vendor who has men’s shirts and some girls’ robes. “Come on, I’m already clearing up because I’m leaving, take two for the price of one,” she shouts, without much success.
In the neighborhood, which was once the residence area of officials, military personnel and highly-positioned professionals, a few years ago such a scandal was unthinkable . “If the people of Nuevo Vedado are like this, asking for water by signs and selling off even their underwear, what is left for those of La Timba or Pogolotti,” says the woman who finally manages to sell a couple of soccer jerseys “used but almost new.”
Others have not had any luck and by almost two in the afternoon they start to pack up. Mirta puts everything in a shopping cart that her daughter sent her. “I’m coming back next Saturday but I’m going to have to lower the prices a little because I see that everyone is doing the same thing, selling the things of those who left.”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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