Unreliable buses, lack of cars fuel rise in hitchhiking

 Herald Staff Report

 HAVANA -- It took a half hour poking his head in strangers' cars for Henry
 Cadenas to get a lift home.

 Most drivers turned him down in favor of pretty young women also using Cuba's
 rising form of public transportation: hitchhiking. In a country where cars are
 reserved for the privileged, and buses are overcrowded and unreliable, these crafty
 commuters have few alternatives.

 ``I usually take the bus, which is not always bad, but today they announced in
 class that there are no buses headed to our dorms because the bus ran out of
 gas, so here I am,'' said Cadenas, a university student who moved to Cuba from
 Ecuador last year. ``In my country, I think we have less public transportation but
 more gasoline.''

 A blue Fiat finally offered Cadenas a ride.

 ``Thank God,'' he said. ``I've been here 30 minutes and I've had it.''

 Cadenas is like most people in Cuba -- a commuter without a car, subject to the
 whims of gasoline shortages, tire shortages and long waits for a bus. Mass transit
 is considered one of Cuba's most serious crises, one that Transportation Minister
 Alvaro Perez says has suffered a ``brutal deterioration.''

 ``When there is no money, or it is not enough to cover the vital necessities,
 transportation gets a lower priority,'' Perez said at a press conference in
 September. ``The lack of transportation vehicles is a grave situation -- above all, in
 the interior of the country.''

 HORSE AND CARRIAGE

 Outside the capital, people have turned to horse-drawn carriages as a way to get
 around.

 Perez said Cuba had 15,600 mass transit vehicles 30 years ago. Now it has
 3,800. In 1988, the transportation system handled 3.2 million riders. The end of
 Soviet subsidies -- which meant the end of spare parts and maintenance for the
 bus fleets -- brought that to 560,000 in 1995. He hopes a recent upswing means
 the bus system will have carried 700,000 passengers this year.

 Frequent bus breakdowns often mean waits of hours or even days. Commuter
 Humberto Garcia joked that he wasn't born black -- he got that way after long
 hours under a bright sun at the bus stop.

 ``Look how dark I got waiting out here for the No. 45!'' he said with a hearty laugh
 and a slap of his knee.

 Garcia had left his house across town at 5:30 a.m. to get to his mother's house
 by 9 a.m.

 ``Sometimes the bus is already full, or they pass you up because they are only
 allowed to pick up so many passengers per feet, or they'll take one person and
 leave you behind,'' he said. ``Nobody I know has their own car. In my house I'm
 rich because I have a bicycle.''

 Laws regulate car ownership, so most people must rely on mass transit. The
 gutsy ride with strangers. Some have the American dollar bill it takes to share a
 cab.

 `THE CAMEL'

 ``Private taxis cost one dollar,'' Garcia said. ``I make $3.50 a day. How am I going
 to pay a third of my wages for a ride home? My bus, the `camel,' [is cheap] but
 when they say there is no gas, there is no bus.''

 ``Camels'' are 18-wheelers transformed into monster buses packed with riders.
 The name comes not from its plodding speed, but because the bus is split into
 two large sections. The fare is about one U.S. cent -- half the price of the more
 comfortable omnibuses.

 ``This is not a crowded bus, this is an empty bus,'' said Benito Garcia, fare
 collector on the M-1, a camel jammed with passengers heading to eastern
 Havana. ``There are times they are so full you could not possibly fit another
 person in.''

 Garcia acknowledged that it frequently takes him several hours to get to work.

 ``It takes, well, as long as it takes,'' he said. ``If the bus before yours broke down,
 then it will take a while. It's better to leave your house with plenty of time.''

 He paused to address the squished riders on the M-1 who were not budging to
 make space for the dozens of passengers lined up outside.

 ``There's room!'' he shouted to the hundred or so on board. ``If you say `Excuse
 me,' there's room!''