Pages

Friday, May 4, 2012

Cuba's little capitalists are ready to rumba

Raul Castro betrays the Faith, and Fidel is too tired to shoot him. Wailing and gnashing of teeth heard from graves in Highgate Cemetery in London as heretics allow Cubans tiny slivers of free enterprise. Meyer Lansky actually crawls out of his grave with bags of casino chips, last seen staggering toward Havana.


Image: To match Special Report CUBA-ECONOMY/REFORMS
Desmond Boylan  /  Reuters/ Customers are entertained as they dine inside the newly licensed restaurant "El Bedouino" in Havana, April 1, 2012. The restaurant is an example of how life is changing in Cuba since President Raul Castro launched a string of limited economic reforms.

When Ojacy Curbello and her husband opened a restaurant at their home in Havana in late December, not a single customer showed up

It was a disheartening debut for Bollywood, the first Indian restaurant in the Cuban capital. Curbello worried that their dream of cashing in on recent reforms in this Communist-run country would collapse.

The next day customers began trickling in. As word spread, the trickle became a flood. Many nights the couple had to turn people away or serve them at the family dining table and call in extra help. Today they are planning to increase the 22-seat capacity by expanding their 1950s home and putting tables and a bar in what is now their bedroom.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Feel free to comment but keep it civil or your comment will be exiled to the voids of cyberspace.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.